What happens every day in the workplace can affect business results more than one is willing to imagine
This is why companies that want to achieve their set goals by the end of the year, and that more generally want to say they are cutting-edge and market-oriented, would do well to allocate time and resources to optimize business processes. It is a matter of taking all the precautions necessary to make the flow of operations that are carried out daily in the company by its employees as linear, streamlined, simple and – last but not least – efficient. It may seem like a complex task, especially at the beginning. However, not only are the resulting benefits such as to amply reward the effort: making company processes more efficient reduces the risk of unforeseen events and accidents of various kinds which can slow down, if not literally block, as in a bottleneck, the normal business operations. There are a few simple factors that taken into consideration right away can make workflow optimization easier.
How to optimize business processes starting from four points
The first of these has directly to do with how business processes are organised: to map all the operations that take place every day in the company and identifying, for each of them, the main responsible players helps to have a more complete picture of how one’s company works – literally -. Once the workflow has been mapped, it is easier to identify both the most relevant processes, those that allow your company to stand out, and the processes that currently work less and more need to be streamlined. The former are not necessarily so-called customer operations, i.e. external processes that have final consumers as recipients: often it is above all internal processes, those involving employees and collaborators of the company, which slow down and make inefficient – and expensive – the work routines in the company.
The second factor to consider is that the best allies for optimizing business processes are a series of data and information that the company itself often already possesses: it is enough to organize them correctly and know how to interpret them. Digitizing your archives is the first, fundamental step, if you mean take advantage of data analysis to make your business processes more efficient and to do so, hardware solutions such as professional multifunction printers with integrated scanners can be useful.
Digitization and automation go hand in hand: those who intend to optimize their business processes would do well to consider, that is, that among the hardware and software solutions specially designed for business there are some capable of improving – and speeding up, which in this case is synonymous with optimizing – workflows within the company by simply replacing employees in carrying out the less complex and more repetitive tasks.
However, this does not mean that people within the company have a secondary role in optimizing processes. On the contrary: often unmotivated employees, not at all satisfied, reluctant to accept changes are the main obstacle to achieving strategic objectives. Optimizing business processes also and above all means like this work on the involvement of their collaborators and on the development of a fully shared feeling and corporate culture.