The idea of making consistent, regular, and incremental enhancements to work is everywhere. Toyota introduced Kaizen, Motorola created Six Sigma, and Agile engineering teams use continuous improvement.
The overarching theme is constant improvement to prevent stagnation in your business.
These improvements take a myriad of forms. It could be as simple as moving certain products to the impulse purchase counter at a supermarket or rearranging the entire assembly line to reduce waste.
Either way, there is always room for improvement. You can create significant efficiencies by paying attention to your processes and optimizing them regularly.
Read on and learn how to use process optimization concepts and methods to streamline your business operations.
Process Optimization: 10 Methods to Optimize Your Business Operations
What is Process Operations Optimization?
Operations optimization is the continuous activity of observing, understanding, improving, testing, and streamlining business processes toward maximizing desired business outcomes such as throughput, efficiency, productivity, profitability, or reducing cost/waste.
Types of Process Operations Optimization
Depending on the process, scale, impact, steps involved, and business goals, there are various process optimization methods. Some of the most common types of process optimization are:
Point optimization
Some situations can be optimized quickly—identifying gaps and taking immediate steps to fix them. For instance, if a project manager finds some tasks missed, they might set up a checklist.
System optimization
Some others need a more strategic approach. An engineering manager deploying dozens of microservices to the cloud might want to study the entire process carefully to understand interlocking steps and make holistic improvements.
Lean optimization
Made popular by the Kaizen methodology, lean optimization focuses on reducing waste. This is often achieved with automation, collaboration, and streamlining workflows.
Process mining optimization
Seen in software engineering and development, it uses data and continuous monitoring to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
Six Sigma optimization
This typically focuses on consistency, using data to identify defects and variations.
Process modeling and simulation
As one of the most commonly used steps in most process optimization programs, it involves visualizing and actively testing various versions of process improvements to identify the best one.
Irrespective of its kind, the foundational steps in designing effective process optimization remain constant. That’s what we’ll discuss next.
Process Operations Optimization Techniques
1. Identify and prioritize the processes to be optimized
Every process has the potential to be optimized. A good business analyst will know what to optimize and when. As a best practice, begin by asking the following questions to the project teams.
- What business processes take too long?
- What processes fail too often?
- Where does wastage occur?
- Which teams wait for information/approvals etc.?
- Which processes don’t produce outcomes that meet the standards set within the organization?
These questions should give you a list of processes that need to be optimized. Once you have this, begin prioritizing. While doing so, consider three factors: effort involved, disruption expected, and potential outcomes.
If you’re just beginning to optimize business processes in the organization, you might want to prioritize those that need moderate effort, cause minimal disruption, and deliver medium to high outcomes.
’s Impact Effort Matrix Template is designed to help you quickly and accurately evaluate the impact and cost so that you know what processes should have the highest priority.
This helps make changes without upsetting the apple cart while demonstrating results.
If you have a mature workflow optimization program, you might choose business processes that require high effort and cause high disruption while delivering high outcomes. The risk of disruption might be worth considering the results it will deliver.
2. Analyze and map the current process
While performing the previous step, you might have understood the basics of what the process entails. Now, it’s time to analyze it more thoroughly.
List every step of the process in as much detail as possible. Speak to the project teams. If they collaborate with other departments, speak to them, too.
Visualize how tasks flow into each stage of the project and categorize them into goals, activities, and action items with ’s Process Map Template.
Note down every inadequacy/inefficiency in each step. For example, in an accounts payable process, uploading invoices to the ERP system might be taking too long, making it ripe for automation. In the marketing department, some designs might be off-brand, requiring better quality control measures.
Ask why the process is the way it is. Often, operations teams change existing processes without clearly understanding the current process.
This can have disastrous effects on other parts of the process or other connected processes.
Once you’ve documented this analysis, map the processes visually. Include related processes to understand the entire landscape.
Use a Gantt Chart to spread it over some time. This helps us see these processes clearly and lays them over various scenarios.
3. Brainstorm improvements to business processes
Think of various improvements you can make to the inefficient business processes. Ask the project team for suggestions—often, they know best what they need.
Take inspiration from other departments that might have already solved this problem. Explore all possible solutions.
A sound mind map is a great way to document all these ideas without fearing a blank page or constraints of rows and columns.
4. Prioritize improvements
Discuss each in detail once you have a list of possible process optimizations. Identify the most likely to solve the problem and deliver the desired outcome while staying within the operational and budget constraints.
For example, if the problem is delays caused by the manual uploading of paper invoices to the ERP, the potential process improvement might be:
- Implementing an AI-powered scanning program that automatically extracts data and updates the ERP. This is high cost, high effort with debatable ROI
- Adding more staff to do the data entry is expensive and unscalable
- Requesting all vendors to send digital invoices via email. This is low cost, high effort, and has a long change cycle
Based on your priorities and constraints, choose the solution that’s right for you.
5. Test the process improvements
Before you implement the process improvements, test them on a smaller scale. You might do this by applying the changes to a small set of users or for a short period.
Monitor the user responses to the improvements. Measure the outcomes. Collect qualitative and quantitative feedback from all stakeholders to ensure your intentions are met.
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6. Implement and improve
If your test succeeds, implement it for the entire organization while preparing for change management.
- Educate all stakeholders about the changes you’ve made
- Invite them to ask questions and respond proactively
- Set up a system to address any issues they might face because of the process optimization you’ve implemented
- Design the metrics and mechanisms to measure outcomes at scale
Most importantly, monitor how each user is adopting the new process. Identify potential opportunities to optimize it further. Keep your inbox open to feedback.
Benefits and Challenges of Process Optimization
Process optimization can be a complex endeavor. It involves making small yet significant changes to processes people follow daily, often subconsciously. Every process optimization has some level of disruption.
The only difference between the successful ones and others is that the former’s results outweigh the disruption’s effects. Good process optimization can benefit you in any of the following ways.
Benefits of process optimization
- Minimizing inefficiencies: Most often, the most significant benefit of optimizing processes is that it eliminates inefficiencies. It reduces time, manual effort, loss of throughput, etc., to enable teams to do more with less.
- Cost savings: Optimized processes minimize wastage and prevent productivity losses as part of the process. This saves costs for the organization. For example, if a developer is waiting for six hours for a cloud environment to be provisioned, reducing that can save on productivity and compensation.
- Improving quality: A robust process is the foundation of good quality output. Process optimization ensures all quality procedures are adhered to, improving the final product.
- Fostering collaboration: While a process is typically a series of steps, many involve multiple people or teams working together. An optimized process needs seamless knowledge-sharing and hand-offs between them. Continuous process optimization enables this, fostering stronger collaboration.
- Mitigating risks: The often ignored benefit of process optimization is its ability to reduce risks significantly. In financial services, a well-optimized process can prevent fraud. In healthcare, it can save lives. In software, it can minimize security breaches and strengthen privacy, confidentiality, security, and compliance postures.
An operational intervention that can deliver such exceptional benefits does not come without challenges. Let’s explore what you will likely encounter in your process optimization journey and how to overcome them.
Challenges of process optimization
- Limited view of the process: Often, people jump to make changes to processes they deem inefficient. So, they make changes without understanding their impact on the people, process, and connected workflows. Imagine moving the cafeteria to the terrace to save on lighting because it doesn’t have wheelchair access. Such changes can have counterproductive consequences.
- Process complexity: Not all processes are simple and sequential. Therefore, changing one step might make the rest of the complex processes collapse like a stack of cards.
- Resistance to change: People often resist change, even if they don’t outright reject it. They might subconsciously continue to follow the old process, causing inefficiencies for themselves and others.
- Insufficient ROI: Most process optimization programs look for a return on investment through increased sales, productivity, speed, etc. The business processes that can’t make such returns apparent might get ignored, losing out on significant opportunities.
- Lack of leadership buy-in: Small, incremental changes are often outside the radar of business leadership. This makes such process optimizations more challenging to implement and enforce.
As you can see, these challenges are not in process optimization itself but in the implementation of it. With the right process improvement tools, you can overcome these challenges and streamline operations. Here’s how.
We live in a world of tool overload. There are dozens of tools for collaboration, project management, communication, and so on. Leverage the right tool stack to improve the outcomes of your process optimization efforts.
Collect accurate and relevant data
Data collection is not a one-time activity. Therefore, you need a systematic approach from multiple perspectives to make your data collection effective.
Run surveys to understand the team’s concerns with the process you’re looking to optimize
Use a time tracker to measure how long each step in the process takes. The time tracker is an excellent tool to do this. You can start/stop the timer or manually add the time spent. You can do this anywhere—mobile, browser, or native apps.
Look at completed project archives to learn more about how the tasks are performed. Go through comments and checklists to analyze current processes.
Collaborate effectively
No process can be optimized successfully without collaboration, be it while collecting data, brainstorming ideas, implementing the change, or measuring results. Do this right with modern collaboration tools.
Use Notepad to take notes and share them with the team. What’s more? Use the AI tools to proofread and summarize them as well.
Use tools like the Whiteboards to visualize business processes. Drag and drop steps, add dependencies, and make it visible for everyone to comment. This creates comprehensive visibility, bringing everyone on the same board!
You can also use Mind Maps to simulate potential improvements and let teams annotate too.
Debate ideas. Propose changes on a document, like Docs, inviting team members to review and offer feedback. Use the comments feature to debate any improvements you suggest, exploring the pros and cons asynchronously.
Plan and Present Better Processes Across Your Teams
Challenges around resistance to change and leadership buy-in can be addressed with better planning, presentation, and communication. We’ve got tools for that!
Use the Gantt Chart View to visualize the process over time. Create before and after views to show the difference process optimization makes. This will help teams imagine the potential upside to accepting the change.
Streamline connected processes with Dependencies. Link-related tasks, customers, orders, deals, users, bug reports, documents, etc. View all relationships and dependencies in one place to make the right decisions.
Use Automations to do the busy work. Automatically change assignees, and priorities, and apply tags to accelerate the process optimization program. Trigger tasks based on any action or condition.
is the only productivity platform that brings all your work in one place. With the power of various built-in features designed to give you control over your processes, it’s the best place to begin your process optimization project.
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