Most businesses at some time will face this question: How to improve company productivity?
Is it your case?
Don’t worry!
In this post, I’m going to show you some common reasons for low productivity, and present ideas for business process improvements using the BPM approach.
OK… but, what is BPM?
BPM is a management discipline that integrates the strategy and goals of an organization with the expectations and needs of clients by focusing on end‐to‐end processes.
It brings together goals, strategies, roles, culture, organizational structures, methodologies, policies, and technologies tools to:
- Analyze, design, implement, control, and continuously improve end‐to‐end processes, and.
- Establish process governance.
This process‐centric approach to business management is supported by automated tools to deliver an operational environment that supports rapid change and continuous improvement.
It’s not so difficult to realize that improving your business processes is the best way to discover how to improve company productivity, isn’t it?
Is it clear the concept of BPM?
So, let’s look at the 6 main reasons for low company productivity and examples of how BPM can help fight them:
6 Reasons for Low Productivity and How to Improve Company Productivity
Technology and Company Productivity
Does your team use e-mails or spreadsheets to control processes and requests?
If your answer to this question is “Yes,” then you are killing your business. No doubt about it!
I’m so sorry for it. 🙁
The more current the technologies employed, the more productive the company. Outdated technology has been a factor contributing negatively to productivity in companies.
To counter this, more and more processes need to be designed correctly and continuously improved by putting BPM tools in a prominent position in an attempt to reverse this situation.
How?
Business Process Automation.
With this feature of BPM technology you can control the execution of the process, improve the productivity of your team, and generate indicators for management.
After specifying all task, deadlines, and triggers, the business process automation will control many aspects of your business.
The team will count on a task list to perform its responsibilities.
Managers will be able to delegate more tasks and will be asked to act just in exceptional situations. Also, decisions wi be taken with more accuracy.
Definitely:
If you want to know how to improve company productivity, technology is the first investment you have to do.
Read more on BPM productivity and automation features.
Education and Company Productivity
Knowledge and skills are crucial for professionals so they can perform their duties properly and productively, or, efficiently and effectively. And it becomes even more necessary for management positions, whether strategic or middle management.
To give you an idea, a survey conducted by the company Kienbaum Consultants International contains very worrying data: Only 15% of the leaders interviewed have the potential for promotion, and less than 30% of leadership positions have substitutes able to perform the same duties.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The fact is that despite efforts to improve the training of managers, the demands of the labor market, especially for people with higher education, are not being met. It has led to many companies absorbing this responsibility, training new employees, paying for courses or even opting to create corporate universities, which, of course, is a more expensive operation.
In this context, the use of BPM tools in people and knowledge management processes can be very useful for improving company productivity.
How?
Just by transferring the knowledge from managers and the personnel to the process documentation and automation.
Yes. It seems to be cruel, but from the perspective of a business, this is one of the critical actions when we want to mitigate the risks of lack of knowledge.
Check out: Human Resource processes: Learn how to implement them here.
Innovation and Company Productivity
Encouraging innovation in many countries begins at school. Encouraging creativity is present in the way teachers behave in the classroom and translates into projects submitted by students.
An example to be followed is the course of Entrepreneurship (E -Lab) at MIT, for bringing together multidisciplinary teams of science, engineering and business students with local start-ups.
The goal is to develop innovative solutions and create new companies and businesses.
In some countries, there are very few similar initiatives and investment in innovation, either by the government, educational institutions and enterprises are short.
The redesign of a process is nonetheless a form of innovation. Often incorporated improvements provide a real revolution in the way the industry adds value to its products and services.
Read more on BPM innovations and explore more this topic.
Also, do you know what Digital Transformation is?
See some examples and find out this revolution.
Protectionism and Company Productivity
In a Brazilian case regarding car manufacturers, there is a perfect example of how excessive protectionism of local industry can negatively affect the company productivity.
After the change of this high tariff policy, the domestic production of vehicles saw a vast improvement in the quality of their products. The same happened in the computer industry.
Without the global weight of competitors, companies feel safe within a comfort zone that they don’t want to get out of.
The result is uncompetitive products and dissatisfied consumers, and unattractive prices.
In fact, protected sectors may even be at risk because once the barriers have been disabled by new government policies, they will not be able to compete with the products that enter the market.
We must be aware of that and manage that risk.
Bureaucracy and Company Productivity
Some countries have inherited strong bureaucratic traditions.
The custom is alive in most governments today, making them slow and expensive.
Source: Bureaucracy Quotes.
The reflection in the company is a huge managerial complication and cost increases in several areas such as:
- Paying Taxes
- Human Resources
- Patents
- Licenses
- Permits
- Plant Approval
- Implementation of promotions
- Preparation of financial statements
- Starting a Company
- Closing a Company
- Participation in competitions
- Delays in legal proceedings
- And much more.
To avoid any problem, you have to consider compliance rules in the design of your business processes, and it has to be optimized for not introduce productivity issues.
Infrastructure and Company Productivity
Ports, airports, roads, waterways, and more, some countries are lacking in many other critical strategic areas as well.
Possibly in the telecommunication or other types of communication, power generation and even security and education sectors.
Company cases that lose much of their output in transport or others that have significant losses due to theft charges are emblematic.
One of the points highlighted today regarding outdated infrastructure is the lack of water that has afflicted many cities and therefore farmers and even industries that use this input in their companies. The lack of clear development policies has led to an outpouring of businesses from some countries.
How can BPM solve this?
When designing your processes, you have to consider these infrastructure issues especially logistics. In this context, a problem can be also a new business opportunity. Also, technologies such as cloud computing and mobility can be used to overcome this challenge and guarantee more productivity.
Conclusion
As I have said, some countries have complex structural frameworks with multiple barriers to company productivity.
Most of these are reasons for the low company productivity are in the external environment of companies, of which there can be no intervention.
So it’s necessary for managers to opt for solutions in which they can have control, that is, they should direct efforts to the internal environment of their companies. The processes need to be reviewed and continuously improved.
In many cases, only a robust and easy to implement BPM tool can help. Using a BPM tool, it would be possible to study in detail each step and activity of the value chain, to find the step most important and relevant and work on its efficiency and effectiveness.
BPM tools can promote greater transparency and speed of communication, ease of monitoring with convenient analysis dashboards, providing more control, productivity and customer satisfaction.
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