15 articles with this tag
Improving business processes increases efficiency and productivity across your entire organization by eliminating waste and reducing costs. Learn four practical approaches including process documentation and standardization, streamlining workflows, automation tools, and strategic outsourcing to transform how your company operates and delivers value to customers.
Process documentation creates flowcharts showing exact steps needed to carry out a business process. This systematic approach helps companies train employees, identify inefficiencies, and enable continuous improvement. Unlike undocumented workflows where knowledge exists only in peoples heads, process documentation ensures consistency and preserves institutional knowledge across the organization.
All businesses want to reduce operational costs, but most throw money at AI and automation without documenting a single workflow first. That's like debugging code you've never read - expensive and backward.
Process improvement prioritizes effectiveness over efficiency because highly efficient processes may still fail to achieve business goals. Six Sigma targets 99.9966% quality through root cause analysis. LEAN manufacturing, pioneered by Toyota, eliminates waste based on customer value. Cross-training employees prevents bottlenecks from sick days and vacations, while regular employee surveys reveal hidden improvement opportunities they see daily.
Process consulting uses coaching and mentoring to help teams solve their own problems when growth creates complexity. Success requires hard data showing how processes work in reality (not just on paper), plus commitment to continuous improvement - much like a Kaizen Event approach.
A process improvement plan documents your strategy for optimizing workflows and eliminating bottlenecks. Learn the ten essential steps to create an effective plan, from selecting processes to testing changes, and ensure employee adoption through visual thinking and co-creation approaches that make improvements stick.