How process optimization can make your daily work easier

Problems and minor issues, challenges and conflicts accompany us daily in our work. We wonder why we have to perform the same work steps over and over again, get annoyed by the tedious copying from one application to the next, or silently suffer under the complex workflows.

Has it ever happened to you that you simply endured problems over time, or became complacent and accepted the circumstances as a given? Then you should definitely read on!

Every day we are confronted with the consequences of our challenges. For example, a customer complains that their inquiry wasn't answered promptly. Or a product was delivered in poor condition, which in turn leads to customer dissatisfaction.

The cause is the current situation. This current situation reflects your everyday worries and challenges, and in this sense, an obvious or hidden deficiency or a desire for change. The good news is that everything that happens has a cause – we just have to find it!

A perceived "too slow response" from our customer's perspective, resulting in "low customer satisfaction," could have various causes. For example, overly complex workflows, insufficient communication among employees, or employee overload could lead to these problems. Therefore, if we want to build a long-term relationship with a customer (effect), we need to determine what resources we need to invest to achieve it (cause).

Everyday challenges, as well as causes and effects

The question of "why" is therefore a crucial first step in the right direction for identifying a problem and bringing about improvement. Problem identified, danger averted? Not quite! We all tend to get bogged down in a problem and lose ourselves in the interplay of cause and effect. Or we jump directly from the effect to the solution without ever having investigated the cause. Ultimately, this often leads to good intentions remaining just that, to resignation, and to accepting the circumstances as given and unchangeable.

WHY – Asking questions about cause and effect – the first step in the right direction

Therefore, don't jump into cause-and-effect analysis too early. Instead, take a step back and transform your problem into an improvement potential. Ask yourself HOW you can improve something and WHAT you want to achieve. Shift your focus away from the problem, or rather the cause-and-effect relationship, and towards the improvement potential! We can address the causes and their effects later.

HOW – Moving away from the problem, towards the potential for improvement

Let's look at an example.

Your current challenge is that customers are complaining about excessively long response times. This leads to you being perceived as 'too slow' and a noticeable decrease in 'customer satisfaction' over the past few months.

Now rephrase this insight as follows: How can I improve my response times so that customer satisfaction increases again?

Instead of conducting detailed cause-and-effect research at an early stage and getting lost in it, you have recognized the potential for improvement and laid the foundation for eliminating a challenge! Other common improvement ambitions that we repeatedly encounter include:

• Increased productivity
• Reduction of production costs
• Quality improvement
• Reduction of lead times
• Improving delivery reliability
• Resource reduction
• Improving capacity utilization
• Process improvement
• Increasing employee satisfaction

Once you've identified and formulated the areas for improvement, it's time to consider their urgency. This will help you determine the order in which you want to address them, and even whether you want to address them at all. Not every area for improvement needs to be implemented immediately. And then you can get started, but how? The answer is usually: process improvement!

Business Process Optimization (BPO) involves implementing gentle process improvements. The goal of BPO is to analyze and document workflows , identify weaknesses , and then gently optimize them. As a first step, you focus on the low-hanging fruit, as they say. You focus on areas where improvements are easy , relatively painless , and cost-effective to implement.

Another option is business process reengineering. As the name suggests, this involves a complete overhaul of the affected business processes. This can sometimes be necessary when, similar to real estate, "repairing" a process would take more time than a complete redesign. The goal is to align the business process with the company's core competencies. Such a comprehensive overhaul usually also involves the introduction of new technologies or software.

Business Process Automation (BPA) allows you to automate processes. One simple way to automate a process is through Robotic Process Automation (RPA). This involves using software robots, or bots, to mimic how humans interact with their computers, use applications, and perform processes. One of the biggest advantages of RPA is the increase in process efficiency through the automation of standard processes. Instead of your employees spending hours manually transferring customer data into Excel spreadsheets or other industry-specific applications and systems, they can be deployed for higher-value tasks. A robot can free you and your employees from routine work, even if an interface between the systems is not possible. Where your IT systems offer little optimization potential, process automation allows you to expand your scope of action nonetheless.

Individual process optimizations are usually only successful when they are combined effectively and appropriate tools are used. Only in this way can the full potential of process optimization be realized!

Regardless of whether a process remediation or process optimization is being carried out, process optimization is always a component of it, or rather, an ongoing process and not a one-off action. The goal should be to act increasingly effectively and efficiently. And this leads us to Business Process Improvement (BPI).

Process optimization methods help your company to stand out from the competition or to keep up!

March 2022, Articles, graphics and illustrations by Gabriela Meier

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