As a business management strategy, business process reengineering focuses on the analysis and design of workflows that can make a team highly effective. It aims to help teams to function effectively to achieve their business goals by ensuring:
As a business owner, you don’t want to chase down people to know where they are with a job. Or imagine a hand-off takes place between different team members – with transparent processes, everyone is on the same page.
It’s also important that departments work towards the same vision for the company and processes help people to keep their performance consistent because they know what is expected of them.
Our 5-steps to creating the ideal process below is based on a typical company structure.
Having processes documented also ensures that your team’s skills are kept up-to-date. It’s easier to identify where improvements can be made if current processes are documented.
As the business evolves, processes are updated. Read more to find out how business process engineering optimizes the different aspect of a company.
In most companies, departments have to work together to achieve customer retention. We’ll use this a our goal to illustrate how departments can use processes. We take into account that companies are unique and can tailor this workflow to your needs.
Sales, Marketing and Operations
Marketing needs to be in the loop on what is happening in sales and operations to create the correct expectations with the potential client. Sales and marketing need to find the clients your operations team need to work with.
Customer Retention
You only get one chance to make a first impression. Most clients or customers realize that there might be something off in their journey with a company if there isn’t clarity and understanding between team members. Therefore, marketing, sales and operations need to hand off smoothly as all three of these have an effect on customer retention. You want to maintain consistency and control in your process.
Human Resources
Having all of these processes in place makes it much easier to onboard new team members. If you want to add a new team member and they’re not able to progress through a process, their manager can see where they get stuck and better assist them through either helping them with the client or taking over the client. Either way this clarity about where someone is in a process is paramount to the client having a good experience. If someone cannot complete the process, you can retrain them based on where they got stuck.
You’re not wasting time, money or compromising your customer’s experience at any point.
Our Integrator, Danielle Palmer, explains how our 5-step process can be used to to onboard new clients and help departments work together for a great client experience
You want to go about business process reengineering in a systematic way. We have found this method to be effective:
Test – Your entire team needs to follow the process, so the steps need to be used and then possibly re-evaluated. You need to decide what form of feedback works for the specific process.
Roll out – Be sure to educate everyone on the process. We like having a debrief after they go through it by themselves – so everyone is on the same page.
Do you imagine reengineering your company through streamlining all the departments? Become the unit you envision, working together to achieve your goals. Learn what you can do to get there with the least effort on your part by harnessing your company’s full potential.
We believe that technology is part of what keeps the engine running in our business. We also love seeing businesses thrive when they achieve the optimal software integration. Recording, collaborating and actually actively using a process checklist makes the business process reengineering go smoothly as the checklist is updated continuously. Remember to include the technology that is going to be used in the steps of your process.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems are great as this allows salespeople to record the pain points that a client raised and hand it off to the operations team. You can also learn a lot about your client and even your competition by listening to and recording clients’ experiences.
This shows clients that you have your business processes in order. Get signatures from clients, share and retrieve information, and send clients reminders using a tool that serves your goals. Talk to us as we are experts in software implementation if you get stuck.
Manage the workflow of your client in a systematic manner. Team members need to set deadlines and reminders so nothing is forgotten and their priorities are logical. Using technology to send team members reminders is much more effective than emails as you’re literally on the same page as you’re using the same process.
If your business needs to engineer or reengineer business processes, reach out to us. We have the experience to assist you every step of the way.
We’d be happy to have you on our Mastermind Group where we talk to entrepreneurs about their business needs. Contact us to find out more.