Business processes are an integral part of your company’s day-to-day operations, and when you have them in place, they can help you prevent mistakes from happening.
With so many different things happening every day in a business, it’s easy to forget something, but a solid business process in place, it can minimise the chances of mistakes and human error.
In this article, we’ll talk about what business processes are and how they can help your business to run more smoothly and increase its overall efficiency.
What is a business Process?
Business processes are a series of steps that produce a product or service. The biggest benefit is that they help to stop mistakes and create a documented list of best practices.
Businesses run by following a number of processes, policies and standard operating procedure in their sales, marketing, accounting, customer service and human resources (HR). If these business processes are documented on a checklist we can see at which stage the process goes wrong or fails.
There are many benefits to having efficient business processes such as reducing mistakes and preventing human error, but there is also a cost-savings benefit as well.
Business Processes Benefits
Eliminating mistakes is often cited as one of many benefits of business processes, but it’s only one. Business processes can also save time, reduce errors and improve the efficiency…and there are other key benefits to using them in your business.
- Reduce Mistakes and Human Error
- Save time and Money
- Increase productivity and efficiency
- Consistent results benefits customers
- Conformity / Best Practices
A proper business process helps prevent these mistakes from happening and ultimately saves you money in the long run.
Why Business Process Mistakes Happens?
Because we rely on many different people and different departments, each with their own priorities, things can easily fall through the cracks.
Thankfully, business processes help us keep track and keep everyone accountable for what they’re doing. Instead of guessing at or forgetting about something tasks it is documented to produce the best possible results.
Avoiding Mistakes Using Checklist
As the cliche goes, “we learn from our mistakes” well at least, we should learn from our mistakes.
Things do go wrong but the most important thing we must understand is why.
There needs to be a true understanding of where it went wrong and how it happened because without this knowledge you’ll repeat the same mistakes over and over again. You need to identify where is affected by said mistake and implement changes that stop it from reoccurring again in the future.
Business Processes help stop mistakes as we know exactly what happened and how we can take steps to stop it from happening again.
Business Process Mistake Example
Employees make mistakes on a daily basis, and sometimes these mistakes can cost you—whether it’s in terms of lost revenue or having to replace expensive equipment or other assets.
Classic example have you heard someone say something like, I didn’t realise I was supposed to do XYZ! This happens because they weren’t following a process, which led to confusion about what he or she was supposed to do. The more processes in place, and followed, means fewer mistakes made.
With business processes in place, employees who might otherwise skip steps will be forced to follow a set procedure that limits errors.
Mistake example, if an employee is transferring data from one piece of equipment to another and doesn’t have a checklist guiding him or her through that process, they may skip a step and lose important data.
Marketing Mistake: Imagine sending out a mailshot to all your clients about a great promotion you have running and you get no sign ups?
It’s a great offer so you really can’t understand why you have had no take ups. Well, it turns out the link within the email marketing promotion was broken so failed when clicked on. Meaning no one got to see that amazing offer.
By creating an additional task within your marketing process pre-release checklist of ‘check for broken links’ you could avoid this mistake error from ever happening again.
Automate Business Processes
Many small businesses today do not have any business processes in place. This results in many opportunities for mistakes to occur. When your business lacks processes, you are likely missing out on ways to automate your company.
One way to fix all of these issues is to implement better business processes into your business. With better business processes, it will be much easier for you to operate your company efficiently while also cutting down on opportunities for errors and mistakes in your day-to-day operations.
Adding Precaution To Business Processes
Register the problem, amend, improvement and avoid error again.
Look through existing processes, create a process library and continually optimise processes so saving you from errors and saving you time and money.
Business Processes stop mistakes and help boost productivity.