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Business processes is a crucial tool that can make your company successful. But frequently I face that some business owners underestimate the power of business processes, and also don’t clearly understand their benefits. If the company doesn’t have business processes, there is a lot of micromanagement that takes a lot of time and delays its growth. I invite you to learn more about business processes and how it can make your company’s development much easier.
First of all, let’s get deeper into the main definitions. Business process - is a strict sequence of tasks and(or) activities that have to be executed by an employee or automated system to produce some service or product. Thanks to this explanation, it becomes clear that business processes exist within every organization, regardless of whether they are formalized or not. It allows an organization to function without permanent manual control on every employee and manage everything from the different abstraction levels.
Business processes can be easily nested to each other, which makes the organization working as a single mechanism. The quality of this mechanism depends on the knowledge, experience, and talent of the business owner or group of people who develops the organization.
Growing of the company - literally means business process improvements. Making them more precise and effective. There are a lot of methodologies and disputes on how to do it right and it is impossible to fit everything to a simple blog post. But let’s take a look at the simplest way of process evolution (just for example).
As we can see the evolution of business processes is iterative. To make effective improvements, you have to collect metrics about every case and every step of the process during some period of time. Only then it will be possible to see raw data and make some attempts to interpret it somehow to make some business process improvements.
And it is hard to imagine, how currently existing companies were growing more than a half-century ago collecting their data manually and so precisely without any help of a computer! It required hundreds of people, for collecting that data and processing it, to make it human-readable.
But since information technology appeared in our lives, business process automation got its big time. Thanks to this, you can take orders, issue invoices, send goods, collect metrics, and much more automatically, without the participation of people. As the company grows, the moment will come when the volume of work will greatly increase. And what people used to do manually, it will be impossible to do effectively and in a short time. Using the business processes automation, company employees get rid of routine and mechanical tasks and get the opportunity to focus on performing new duties, research tasks, or any activity that requires the use of the employee's experience and knowledge.
It is not a secret, that any business and any company is unique. As well every company is created to bring some value to the world, otherwise, it would be nonsense. Any company is born from the small idea of its founder (-s) and growing day by day until it will shine bright with its success. But before, it has to survive in the rough world of big business, competitors, market challenges, and other harmful circumstances.
To make everything possible, the business processes have to satisfy the next requirements:
As you can see, it is literally vital to have your business processes under control. Neglecting of its fact unambiguously will lead to the collapse of your company sooner or later. Fortunately, modern business automation approaches significantly simplifying this task. In concept, you have 2 ways of how you can automate the business processes of your company:
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You will have a solution that perfectly fits your business needs and gives you full control over your processes. You can collect any kind of metric, make any change to the process and re-organize everything as you need. |
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It would cost you a significant amount of time and money for its development and following support. Unfortunately, not every type of business can afford this solution. |
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This choice will save you a fortune of money and can be a nice compromise in the early stages of your business development. Most of the small size and middle-size companies are going this way. |
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Most of the box-solutions for business having averaged business processes inside that are hardly or even not extensible. It can bring serious limits to your business development and significantly slow down your growth. |
For those who are just going to create custom software or choose a box-solution: The best advice would be to approach this issue extremely delicately. Your choice will affect the rate at which your company grows. First of all, carefully investigate the market of existing products and track their pros and cons. In the case of a box-solution, choose the most flexible solution that suits your requirements as closely as possible and gives you a space for maneuvers in the near future. In the case, you decided to create the custom solution, you have to be sure exactly why existing products can not satisfy your needs.
For those companies that offer box-solution products: Would be nice to try to make your product extremely agile and customizable because it is your main competitive advantage among other products. You should adjust to the needs of your clients, otherwise, your product will severely limit customer activities. As a bonus, I would recommend you to look at this article: “Business Automation Strategies Overview”. Here you can find some fresh ideas about how to make your product more flexible and preferable by your clients.
