Recently I’ve been involved in the start up of a small business. One thing that I’ve noticed that is one of the top priorities in this business is to streamline your manual processes.

When starting a small business, there are usually limiting factors at play. The most common is lack of capital. This is OK, it just means that you need to be creative in the way that you run your business within the limitations. When having a lack of capital, this usually also creates limitations in human resources. Ideally, there are processes that you would love to hire someone to come in and take over so that you can get on with other work (you’ve got more than enough in a small business). But, not having the cash to spend on an additional employee means that you’re stuck.

But, all is not lost. We’ve found that we can invest some of our time to streamlining our manual processing to cut down the amount of work we are doing. Computers are such a blessing, but they don’t just save you time by just buying one. You need to sit down and analyse how you can utilise your computer systems to automate processes that then saves you time in your business.

Start from the very start of your sales (or whatever) cycle and finish at the very end. Find where there is time spent by a person, find out if that could be streamlined by automating it, even if it’s only part of it. We have an online store and part of our time is taken up by adding new products to the site. Now, adding new products is a very important part of our business growth, but we don’t always have the time to add them. Firstly, we did it manually adding them to the database, that took a long time, probably 25-30 minutes per product. We then built an interface to the online store to add products, this cut the time down to 15 minutes. An improvement, but not quite there yet.

More recently, we built a more efficient interface to adding products by automating some parts of the interface (pricing, etc). We brought the time down from 15 minutes to around 5 minutes! So, in all, we invested approximately 5 days of work to improve our processes, and went from 30 minutes down to 5, in a process that grows our business and is performed reguarly by our staff.

Not only does it save time and increase business growth, but it also reduces staff frustration by having easier and faster systems that are partly automated where ever it can be. Down the line, this then reduces human resources costs and increases staff retention.

All in all, streamlining is a good thing. Invest some time to do it constantly within your business.

What is Business Process Management?

To stay competitive in the marketplace a business needs to be cost effective. This is largely accomplished by streamlining the operations of the business and making sure the processes are running at peak efficiency. All businesses run via processes and Business Process Management (BPM) is a technology developed to give businesses the framework in which to manage more effectively the processes that make them tick. Business Process Management technology is able to automate the managing of processes in your business, but allows for human intervention wherever necessary.

Most business processes involve more than one department and even different organizations. These processes rely heavily on the information from and participation of multiple systems. Business Process Management technology is designed to facilitate these processes by integrating the various components into one streamlined system that runs smoothly and efficiently on a partially or completely automated flow of steps.

Business Process Management automates the flow of a process and it automates the extraction of information needed to ensure that the process is completed properly. When human intervention is needed, each person is notified at the appropriate time to implement the step or steps that must be provided. Business Process Management is also able to provide tracking of results and allows a business to measure the success of operations. The flexibility is in place to allow for changes to be made within the process so that the improvements in the operations will create a better outcome.

What to Look for in Business Process Management Technology

Business Process Management technology for your business should include at least the following components:

• Design tools and user interfaces
• API/framework layer
• Data transformation
• Process automation, workflow, and rules engine
• Connectivity services
• Activity management for your business

One of the main problems that businesses run into when they begin to consider Business Process Management technology is they find out that they do not fully understand the current processes they have in place. There is a large amount of preparation involved when integrating a Business Process Management solution into your existing business process framework and many businesses do not understand their processes well enough to model them in the new Business Process Management solution. If the business processes are not well understood, then incorporating BPM technology into the framework of the business’ processes may only create more confusion. However, if the processes of the business are defined properly during preparation for the Business Process Management technology, then not only will the processes be fully understood, but weaknesses in the systems may be uncovered that can be rectified trough the use of Business Process Management. A business must determine its needs first and then look at the available options for BPM technologies that exist. It is also important that, from the business end, there is executive-level sponsorship of the Business Process Management implementation plan and that there is user buy-in. A business will also need a project team to follow through on the integration of Business Process Management into the existing framework of their company and they will need a full understanding of all deployment considerations. Lastly, the business must have a realistic view of the milestones along the way. It will take time to implement the entire Business Process Management solution.

In your business case for implementing Business Process Management, you of course need to consider your Return on Investment (ROI) and in evaluating the success of the Business Process Management technology for your business, it will be important to compare the actual results against the ROI predicted in the planning stage.

In addition to this, there are other ways to gauge the success of your Business Process Management implementation. By calculating your total cost of ownership, you will be able to make a baseline comparison between your before and after results based on the total cost of running your business. Determining the operational efficiency will reveal the cycle time, the total amount of time needed to run a process, and the required resources, the total number of people and systems needed to support the process. The greater the cycle time and required resources, the less cost efficient the process. Unit cost reduction is another way to gauge the success of the Business Process Management implementation. This allows you to determine the actual cost savings for the business, which affects the bottom line.

Summary

The implementation of Business Process Management technology can be an effective way for a business to streamline the processes that make them tick, which can greatly affect their bottom line. By integrating Business Process Management technology into the process infrastructure of your business, you will be able to automate many of the steps needed to see a process through to completion. During the preparation stage of Business Process Management deployment, a full understanding of the processes may lead to knowledge of how to make things work better. Business Process Management technology makes sense for any business that runs on complicated processes. These businesses include, but are not limited to, financial services, insurance, government, healthcare, and manufacturing. Business Process Management makes sense in a business world where the bottom line means everything.

Peter Peterka is President of 6 Sigma us. For additional information on Six Sigma Black Belt or other Six Sigma Online Training contact Peter Peterka.

A Document Management System can be an important business tool for your business, but make sure that you assess all aspects of such a system. Document Management Systems are complex and effective systems play a central role within your business.

Now, as a business person, you know what documents are used within your organisation, we’re talking about spreadsheets, letters, reports, tenders, images and presentations. Now, if your documents are created with the input of many people, document management systems can be very beneficial. The other use of document management systems is to have the facilities to share documents with other interested parties.

One of the greatest advantages of a document management system is that the latest version or revision of a document can be available for all interested parties. Now, this could be accomplished by using a plain old network share, but there is more to a document management system than just this type of feature.

You can also assign security, restricting users from reading, editing, creating or deleting documents. By using one central document system, you can set security for all of the documents stored in your system. This means that by creating user groups, you can easily change security levels in one central place for all documents. This gives you more power and greater flexibility whilst keeping administration simple.

Getting information to the right people with minimal fuss is one of the greatest challenges in any business. A good document management system gives you the ability to search within all your files for keywords or phrases. This enables you to share information with people and improve communication. If an employee receives an “out there” question, their first point of call can be to search the document management system saving time and money. Their question can be answered without having to waste the time of other employees and save the frustration of people having to repeat themselves.

So, this gives you some idea as to what a document management system is and what advantages it can offer to your business. More in depth analysis will be given in future articles so stay tuned.

Welcome to Better Business Systems. We are passionate about helping businesses improve their business systems. Building these quality systems is quite difficult to get right. There are a lot of options, and not all of them deliver the best solution to some businesses.

Our goal is to bring insight into the possible systems that are around, assessing them for their effectiveness and helping businesses to make informed choices. Hopefully our goal will be realised and many businesses will reap the benefits of great systems that deliver better service, lower costs and better performing employees.

Some of the key systems that we’ll be keeping an eye on are Document Management Systems, Business Process Management and Customer Relationship Management.

Some previous writing that our authors have written is currently sitting at CRM for Small Business but we feel that the focus of the site was too narrow. There seems to be plenty of systems and ways that businesses can do things better.

Join us in the journey by providing feedback via the comments feature of the site. We want this to be as interactive as possible, so your invitation has been extended!