If you are looking for continued success and growth for your business, it is essential to understand business processes well. It starts with identifying the processes before analyzing them.
Why identify business processes? To work more efficiently and effectively!
By dwelling on what processes are running in your business, naming them and understanding them, you can find opportunities for improvement and consequently boost efficiency and effectiveness. In this blog, we outline the steps to identify business processes. But first, let’s take a moment to consider the types of processes operating in your organization, department or team.
Types of processes
To get a good overview of the different types of processes, it is important to classify them according to their nature and purpose:
- The most important types of processes are primary processes, which are processes that contribute to direct value creation for your customer. This gives you insight into what activities are indispensable to get your services or products to your customer. Optimizing these processes generates profit for your customer and for your organization!
- The supporting processes are these processes needed to support the primary processes. When making improvements, you will note that employees become more satisfied and indirectly this will have a positive impact on the primary processes. If you are a manufacturing company and you invest in an optimal logistic flow, you reduce waste and unnecessary operations. Consequently, you facilitate faster delivery times to your customers.
- The managementprocesses are those needed to run the organization. Optimization in management processes can be achieved by reducing meeting times, for example. Fewer, but more effective meetings, give managers and executives the opportunity to invest more time in their employees and customers e.g.
Steps to get to know your processes:
Step 1: Identify the most important business processes, namely those that contribute to the organization’s goals and whose results are measurable. These processes can be linked to the mission and vision (see our blog on mission, vision and values).
Step 2: Next, you examine what processes are in place to manage these so-called core processes. These are the management processes.
Step 3: After, you determine the supporting processes. These will facilitate the core processes.
Step 4: Visualize the relationship between the three types of processes through a “process map”.
The process map is ready: now what?
From this process map you will gain insight into where the shoe pinches and you can take a closer look at the process you want to improve with a process analysis.
To identify process improvements, an analysis of the process steps is needed so that the bottlenecks become visible. Based on this, improvement actions are suggested that can lead to changes in the way tasks are performed, the technology used or the way processes are organized.
Consistently applying process analysis -and optimization is one of the keys to achieving ever better and ultimately excellent results.
Triggered to discover our tools for optimization? Contact Insightful or schedule your free consultation here.