5 Reasons your Business needs Processes and Procedures

What makes your business special is the way you do things.  This could be the things that you do that allow you to be efficient, that make you quirky or just the things you do that are so much better than the competition.

Optimising these processes is key to achieving your business goals, and that’s where business processes and procedures come in.

What are Process and Procedures

Process: “a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.”

Procedure: “an established or official way of doing something.”

Let’s explore five of the key reasons your business needs efficient processes and procedures and the potential benefits you could gain, both in the short term and throughout the longevity of your business with effective business systems.

1. Processes and Procedures improves efficiency

A common challenge for many businesses is that business processes are often inefficient, which results in an increase in waste, predominantly in time and money.  It’s likely that there will be many processes in your business that are not working as seamlessly as they should be, and Processes and Procedures are a great way to address this.

The first step is to identify what is a current business practice, and then you can put steps in place to make changes.  If your business processes are truly optimised for efficiency, you will be able to reduce costs and save precious time and money.

2. Processes and Procedures support business knowledge transfer

Everyone has to retire at some stage, and people do leave for all sorts of reasons.  So how do you ensure that critical business knowledge doesn’t follow your employees out of the door when they leave?  Processes and Procedures can be an excellent solution for this as it provides a straightforward method to capture and store important information.

3. Processes and Procedures provides a framework for Continuous Improvement

If you are interested in implementing a continuous improvement initiative in your organisation, then Processes and Procedures provide an excellent framework for success.  Continuous Improvement is a long-term approach to making minor improvements gradually over time, as opposed to one significant change that occurs all at once.

In this case, Process and Procedures allow you to look closely at your business processes and make minor, incremental improvements based on business activities.  However, continuous improvement will only be successful if you have the full support and engagement of your employees.

4. Processes and Procedures supports the implementation of other IT systems

The implementation of a large IT system can create friction between the IT department and the rest of the business, especially if there is a lack of communication around the potential impact a new system may have on the rest of the organisation.  Processes and Procedures can support the implementation of many different systems as it allows you to have a complete overview of everything your business does and how it does it.

Before you begin to implement any system, you need to clearly understand what your business does and the impact that any change is likely to have on your organisation, department by department.  Any new system needs to support the needs of the business rather than the other way around, and by having Processes and Procedures in place, you can model the effects of your system before it is put in place.  This means that you will be able to minimise or eliminate any risks before they occur, as well as communicate the impacts.

5. Processes and Procedures eliminates siloed working

Businesses can find that their core departments or employees work very independently from each other, and they do not understand or are not aware of what the other does.  This can cause problems, especially when there are numerous processes that overlap several different departments.

Having Processes and Procedures will help to eliminate siloed working as the processes will become visible to the whole organisation.  This will help departments and employees to see where they fit in the bigger picture and should encourage process analysis and improvement.

What are the benefits of using dedicated Processes and Procedures

There are many benefits that come with using Processes and Procedures, especially once you have a clear idea of what processes exist in your business and how they are performed.  As mentioned above, once you have a clear overview of all your business processes, you can begin to analyse them to discover the areas that need improvement and set a plan in motion to start making the changes based on data-driven evidence.

Some other benefits include:

• Creates a one-stop shop for business processes, procedures and documents.
• Identifies bottlenecks so that process improvements can be made.
• It gives insight to achieving significant cost reductions based on continuous improvement of processes.
• Makes sure that all employees in the organisation are carrying out the processes in the same way.