In today’s competitive business world, finding ways to improve efficiency in your organisation is crucial for success. But where do you begin? We’ve put together some business process improvement examples to help you understand what you may be able to do to streamline processes and improve efficiency.
Automate more processes
One of the best ways to boost efficiency in your business is to automate as many tasks as you can. Not only does that reduce the amount of time it takes to complete a task, but reduces the chance of human error — which in turn shrinks time needed to revisit a piece of work.
But what can you automate? With the significant and rapid development of technology and AI, the amount of tasks you can automate might surprise you.
- Accounting and bookkeeping. Cloud accounting software can automate parts of managing your books by using optical character recognition tools to ‘read’ text from a receipt, and transfer the financial data to your books. It can also characterise your expenses, reconcile data with your bank statements and generate financial statements.
- Payroll administration. AI tools can calculate payroll computations without errors.
- Auto-approval. Software can also allow your business to automate approvals to reduce the need for manual intervention and accelerate decision-making.
- Data analysis. If you work with numbers and datasets, AI can quickly scan the figures to produce reports and give recommendations based on what it sees.
- Content creation. Some AI tools can suggest topics for your social media page and even write content for you — although make sure you edit what it produces to include a human touch.
Streamlining customer service processes
As a business that relies on customers coming back time and time again to buy your products or services, you need exceptional customer service. Therefore, it’s worth thinking about how you can improve yours to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
To create a more efficient service, you could start by implementing a digital customer relationship management system (CRM), which you can use to store customer data that your team can use for personalised interactions.
With data like contact details stored on the CRM, initiating contact can also be quicker, as everyone’s details are on one system — rather than hidden away on the assistant manager’s phone who couldn’t make it in today!
Implementing effective management systems
Effective management systems play a crucial role in streamlining processes. By implementing them, you can establish clear guidelines, roles and responsibilities to reduce ambiguity that make processes more efficient.
We also recommend that you use project management software, which can help assign tasks, track progress and provide real-time visibility into the status of projects. You can then reassign and prioritise as necessary to ensure your team is working as efficiently as possible.
Collaborate with team members
The opportunities to streamline business processes are too many to count, especially in a blog post like this. That’s why we wrote an eBook about streamlining processes, which takes you through a smart process that helps you understand where you can improve your workflows.
One of the key recommendations we made in our latest eBook about streamlining processes and workflow was to stay in regular contact with your team while investigating which processes you can streamline and how. After all, they’re the ones who work with these processes, so they’ll know what bottlenecks exist and may even have ideas on how to improve them.
As such, regular feedback loops, brainstorming sessions, and cross-functional collaboration can unveil improvements that we may not have covered in this article — or even ones that you might not have thought about before!
Need help with your business processes? Read our eBook for more business process improvement examples and a step-by-step guide to improving workflow.