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.
