Efficiency – Step 1: Map Your Current Processes

So, I have been talking about the efficiency of business processes in the previous blog (read it here), and here is the first step to becoming faster, slicker, and more efficient. 

Here is a simple four-step process to follow to become efficient:

1. Map your current business processes
2. Review
3. Map New and Add Technology
4. Test & Implement

Today, let’s discuss the first step.

Step 1: Map Your Current Business Processes 

You’re going to need to set yourself time aside to do this exercise. There’s a good chance you’ll try to put this off for as long as possible because potentially it’s going to be hard work and time-consuming. To improve you need to know where you are and I promise you the business will eventually thank you for it.   

There are two key rules to this process:  

1. Reality is king – it’s not what you think the process is, it’s what actually happens day-to-day.  
2. Don’t try to fix it – while reviewing your business processes it’s tempting to dive in and start fixing. DON’T! You’ll only slow the flow of review and lose sight of the purpose 

What we want to achieve is to have all the business processes laid out on a floor, laid out on a table, or hung up around a room.  This way you can stand back and see the whole picture. It’s also important to collect the paperwork or screenshots of the information and data you’re collecting and inputting. This way you’ll see the business processes and underneath it the corresponding paperwork trail.

Start at the beginning of your customer’s journey and work along until the final process, in most cases, this is normally in accounts with the transaction getting reconciled with the bank.   

At various points, your customer passes through different departments or people. Here’s how to rule one above applies, you must get someone from that department to tell you how they do it. Remember, “Reality is King”. You’ll need to explain that the process isn’t designed to catch anyone out, you’re there to make the customer journey better. In order to do so, you need to know what actually happens, not what people think happens.   

Start at the beginning of your customers’ journey. You’ll need to work with marketing or sales. How does your customer first contact you? It will probably be in many ways: a contact form on your website, an email, a phone call. What information is collected, on what forms? Keep going through the process; what happens next? And next? Make sure the people doing the process are the ones telling you what happens. Keep collecting the paperwork including brochures and sales materials. What about suppliers’ forms, how do they require information, and in what form?  

In some businesses this might be fairly straightforward, some will need a lot of room. Once you’ve got right the way through to the end of the customer journey, normally reconciling the bank account, stand back and look. This bit is normally the amazing “oh shit how did that happen?” moment when you realise the complexity of what you do. 

So, give yourself time to do this very important step and once you’re done, you can check out the next step here.