Best practices to analyze and improve your business process

A direct goal of the process analysis is its improvement. It happens through the cost-cutting and the reduction of the processes’ conclusion time. For the business process improvement analysis have a better chance to work, the stages must be conducted according to the market’s best practices.

The business process analysis and improvement should also serve the stakeholders’ interests, and be aligned with the corporate governance policies. The processes systematization will allow the directors to exercise influence based on standardized key performance indicators (KPIs). An audit trail enables process adequacy and compliance requirements.

Although the processes and flows do become simpler with the improvements adopted, the process analysis through BPM practices (if you need to understand better what BPM is, just click on the link!) have to see beyond the process optimizations and improvements.

See 5 benefits BPM will bring to your company now.

Business process analysis and improvements: the correct tools.

It is critical that managers and business analysts count with the right tools, have access to a solid BPM consultancy and can rely on a qualified staff with BPM training.

It is also crucial that everybody speaks the same language, and that this language stands the time test.

If consolidated methodologies are conducted when analyzing the effective processes, the process mapping BPM will be done in a standardized way, with accurate definitions and documentation. To know more about what is process mapping or what are the process mapping techniques, click on the links and read more on our website.

Process analysis: First steps

Following are some examples of the first measures to take to the processes’ analysis results consistently:

1. Business problem identification or scope demand

To successfully face business matters we have to use an approach that assures that all the details related to such issue are clearly set.

The scope must be widely understood, the language used has to be common to everybody and, most importantly, all the people responsible have to agree and comprehend in an equal level occurrences like scope and deliverables.

The creation of a process inventory eases and regulates the analysis. In addition to that, it defines a “common process language” used to describe a problem or demand.

The deliverables include:

  • Identify which processes are in the scope, and in what order they must be analyzed.
  • Define what each process means in its business context, and make a brief purpose statement (what the process is projected to do).
  • Clarify each process, in a sequence, by organizational level, department, and function.
  • Assign the organizational positions that are involved in the process (key people’s names).
  • Recognize any critical IT systems in the process.
  • Effort estimation, approach, and cost to analyze each process.

2. Business Process Analysis (AS-IS)

To effectuate the decision-making about the business processes changes and visualize what impact or added value will happen, it is essential to fully understand the business processes as they are now (as opposed to how they will become), through a quantifiable and easy to apprehend layout.

There is no recommendation or solution that is completed without knowing the baseline of the current income, volumes, function cost and other metrics.

It is important to map the business processes as-is in detail, plainly describing:

  • Activities
  • Function
  • Processes interaction.
  • Systems that are currently in use.

See also: Business Process Modeling and Documentation Tool – Create Your Free Account!

3. Metrics capture

It is essential to determine the relation between each function that exists in a process and the activities that they have to analyze:

  • Time elapsed in every stage of the process.
  • The amount of input.
  • Function costs.

Metric are essential to the analysis and improvement of business process

The process analysis using metrics that figures, for example, how much time and money is invested in each cycle and stage of the process, since the input until the output, establishes a quantitative and measurable baseline, for comparison purposes.

Measuring this numbers through management dashboards, as well as developing statistical forecast analysis, will allow changes to be determined by decision-makers responsible, in a reactive way or according to the business strategies.

To improve company’s organization and increase the percentage of goals reached is to take full advantage of business process improvement analysis. These processes, highly detailed, must also have quality and cohesion. Know more continuing in our website and reading about the quality process.

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