what term is used to describe streamlining processes with automation or simplified steps?

Make your business or organization operate more efficiently past implementing faster or easier processes. Information technology seems like a no-brainer, right? This is the verbal purpose of streamlining. Whether your company ships products, onboards new employees, sells virtual technology, or treats medical patients, you tin can improve overall efficiency by streamlining business processes.

This article will cover the benefits of streamlining, ways to streamline business processes, and approaches to choosing technologies that help you reach that goal.

What Does It Mean to Streamline Something?

Streamlining, past definition, is the human action of altering an particular to brand it simpler or more efficient. For instance, you can streamline the work of invoicing clients past ensuring the steps in the process are consequent and repeatable, regardless of who is creating and distributing invoices.

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What Does It Hateful to Streamline a Process?

A business procedure is a series of repeatable activities that are carried out in specific society to accomplish a goal. Each activeness constitutes a task. A chore, in turn, may be a function of a procedure, or it may exist a one-off issue.

For case, in the process of onboarding a new hire, yous fill out paperwork, tour the office, provide equipment and work space, and introduce the team members. In this scenario, one of your tasks is to make full out paperwork.

Allow's become dorsum to the process of invoicing clients. Documenting this procedure may be the showtime step in identifying the activities that contribute to invoicing. Once you've documented your workflow, you lot may find activities that tin be eliminated and/or automated, resulting in a streamlined invoicing process.

What Is Streamlining Business concern Processes or Operations?

The formality of concern processes will vary among organizations. Typically, a formal process is documented, whereas an breezy process occurs without much thought or planning. A streamlined business process results in faster outcomes with fewer bug.

Workflow and concern process direction software solutions are specifically designed to streamline and automate processes across business departments. Numerous business organisation divisions can do good from streamlined processes:

Human being resource and administration: New employee onboarding
Sales and marketing: Follow-up email distribution
Finance and bookkeeping: Vendor invoice submission
Operations: Production delivery
Procurement: Production orders
Management: Employee review
Information technology: Countersign reset
Nugget management/predictive maintenance: Asset discovery and inventory
Supply chain management: Replenishment of raw materials
Compliance documentation: Quarterly reporting
Project management: Job notification

Benefits of Streamlining Business Processes

Co-ordinate to a contempo Gallup poll, only 32 pct of U.S. workers were engaged in their jobs in 2015. Streamlined business processes not only reduce errors and speed progress, but also help clarify task duties and enforce accountability. Therefore, doing and then can improve employee morale and encourage employee engagement.

Businesses of all sizes benefit from streamlined processes. Some boosted advantages include the following:

Increased efficiency, productivity, agility, and profits
Improved communication
Clearly documented procedures and greater visibility into processes
Reduced errors, holdups, silos, missed deadlines, and redundant work
Improved compliance with industry standards
Simplified employee training
Improved employee adoption
Streamlined team coordination
Defined job ownership and workflow bureaucracy
Improved accountability
Increased employee morale
Established workflow hierarchy and buying of tasks
Enforced accountability
Improved customer satisfaction
Version command maintained

How to Cull the Business Processes to Streamline

Each organisation uses a multitude of business concern processes every day. Some may exist efficient, but others may non be. You tin can identify these inefficient processes in a number of ways. Unsatisfied customers, increased expenses, and overworked staff are all signs of problematic processes. Other inefficiencies may not be and so obvious. A good practice is to take inventory of all business organization processes, categorize them by department, and prioritize them by importance.

How to Streamline Business Processes

Afterward yous take identified and prioritized all business processes, y'all tin can begin streamlining. This requires awareness of the process and documentation of each footstep or activeness that takes place to reach the goal. In order to streamline a business organisation process, follow these steps:

Identify the goal or terminate result.
Break down the process into detached steps or tasks.
Analyze the process steps, perform value concatenation analysis, evaluate handoffs, and place bottlenecks.
Gather input from those who perform the process and related tasks, or who benefit from the procedure.
Identify unnecessary activities.
Place redundant activities.
Identify activities that can be automatic using engineering science.
Redesign/automate tasks.
Asking resource to evangelize on process.
Communicate process plan and gain stakeholder/management support.
Offer training.
Define key performance indicators (KPIs).
Track and study on successes and failures.
Commit to continuous comeback: exam, review, refine.

The size and blazon of business will help make up one's mind the depth of work required when streamlining your processes. For example, a small business may non crave stakeholder approval, but a large enterprise will require buy-in from stakeholders and diverse levels of management.

Streamlining Techniques

Six Sigma, a set up of techniques and tools for procedure improvement, was developed in 1986. 6 Sigma continues to be used today, particularly in the manufacturing manufacture, to improve process.

Each business organization and industry utilizes unique process improvement techniques, but one commonality is that virtually organizations employ process mapping when working to improve efficiencies. This is also usually known as a flowchart, a process model, or a workflow diagram. A process map reveals everyone and everything that is involved in a process. The goal of process mapping is to identify areas that the organization can improve.

Beneath you will notice sample business process maps:

Flowcharts: Graphical illustrations of your processes.
Swimlane Diagram: Delineates accountability in a process past placing tasks and activities within the swimlane of the appropriate employee, team, or department.
Value Stream Mapping: A lean enterprise technique that is used to amend the menstruation of materials and information in the production of a production or service.
SIPOC (suppliers, inputs, process, outputs, customers): A visual overview of a business process.

SIPOC Diagram Template

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Gantt Nautical chart: Used in project management to map project tasks and schedules.

Project Plan and Gantt Chart Template

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Additional techniques used in business organization process management vary by industry, only may include the following:

GUT Matrix
BASICS Matrix
Root Cause Analysis
Systems Diagrams
Bear on Analysis
Risk Assay
Cause and Effect Assay
Value Chain Analysis
Fishbone Diagrams
Brainstorming
Client Feel Mapping
The Modify Bend
Business Case preparation
Kotter's 8-Step Modify Model
Kaizen
Petri-Nets
Universal Process Notation

One time you develop the process map, yous tin begin analysis. This is one of the virtually important steps in process improvement. Your analysis volition uncover real bug that need to be addressed.

Other mutual philosophies and analysis techniques include the following:

Gap assay
Root cause assay
Observation
Value concatenation assay
v Whys analysis
Cause and effect
Impact assay
Risk analysis

Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA)
Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN)

Customer experience mapping
Lean
Total quality management (TQM)

Technologies to Streamline Business Processes

The concept of business process management is closely aligned with TQM, continual comeback, Six Sigma, and Lean process improvement approaches. Business procedure management has become big business for software vendors, who have adult a multitude of innovative solutions to streamline workflow or business processes.

These tools are designed to collect, automate, measure, and improve business organization processes. Below yous will notice information nearly a multifariousness of business/workflow procedure automation software.

Business Process Management (BPM) Software: Concern procedure direction as an operations management discipline views business organisation processes equally important avails that must be managed and clearly developed in order to deliver value. BPM software helps organizations automate and optimize business processes. According to Gartner Peer Insights, "A BPM platform minimally includes: a graphical concern process modeling adequacy, a process repository to handle the modeling metadata, a process execution engine and a state management or rule engine." Digital transformation initiatives rely on the intelligence, rapid application development, and mobile capabilities of modern BPM solutions to fulfill the need for agility and speed.

Client Relationship Management (CRM) Software: CRM solutions are focused on the organisation's interactions with customers and prospects. Process efficiency is extremely important, with the goal of improving relationships with the customer.
Enterprise Content Direction (ECM)/Enterprise Certificate Management Software: ECM solutions are used to manage, store, preserve, and deliver content to processes beyond an organization. ECM software works closely with BPM and CRM solutions.
Projection Management Software: Also referred to as flowchart software, projection management solutions help take unwieldy projects and organize them into processes.
Product Management and Development Software: Production evolution software follows a procedure that takes a product or service from conception to market-readiness.
Legal, Accounting, and Finance Tools: Software solutions designed for legal and finance can help streamline certificate signing and tracking, invoicing, expense reporting, payroll, accounting, taxes, reporting, and analytics.
Human Resource and Marketing Software: These tools can simplify the hiring process, employee scheduling, timesheet approvals, customer feedback, customer engagement, and collaboration.
Personal Productivity Tools and Apps: Apps and online solutions are readily available for automating the creation of checklists, managing to-dos, logging activities, and tracking time spent.

What to Look for in Business Procedure Modeling Tools

Concern process modeling is one element of business process management. The goal of business process modeling is to benchmark current processes with future goals. Visual documentation helps users empathise and clarify the activities, events, and resource associated with a process. Business procedure modeling incorporates process mapping, process discovery, and process simulation.

When evaluating business concern process modeling tools, consider the following criteria:

Easy for business organisation departments to larn

Easy for Information technology teams to discuss with and teach to other departments
Inexpensive and manufacture compliant
Includes an integrated workflow editor tool with graphic interface
Power to simulate workflow before implementing

Sample Automated Workflow Process

Invoice approving, employee onboarding, expense processing, and service requests are just a few examples of work processes that businesses can automate.

Invoice submission is a mutual practice beyond all industries, and can exist streamlined with automation. Vendors, contractors, and employees submit invoices on a regular footing. Create a repeatable blessing process to ensure anybody is paid quickly and accurately

Invoice Approval Process

Signs It's Time to Update Your Business Technology

There's more one way to streamline your business processes. In some cases, but updating your company's technology can yield greater efficiency and college productivity. The following listing includes indicators that you might need to enact an improvement programme:

Slow server/network
Employees mutter about poor Information technology support
Employees complain that they don't take the tools they demand for the chore
Employees express dislike for the solutions y'all have and take stopped using them
Silos exist between departments and data is not unified
Technology doesn't let your business concern to be active/doesn't evolve with your business organisation
The customer feel is defective

Best Practices for Business Automation

The decision to streamline your concern processes is important. If your business processes are causing customer dissatisfaction or employee discontent, or if they cost you more than necessary, it's time to brand a alter. Below are a few tips that will help improve concern operations with automation:

Discover out what your customers call up by conducting a survey. Target questions to discover out what is and isn't working.
If employee training is necessary, hire an exterior expert who has experience training numerous types of people and unlike levels of leadership. Consider specific training for leaders. Consider the impact of downtime due to staff attending training (this is especially important for smaller businesses).
Place broken processes and focus on fixing them before applying technology. As Nib Gates is famously said, "The first rule of whatsoever engineering science used in a business organization is that automation practical to an efficient performance volition magnify the efficiency."

Identify whether full general staff or programers volition employ and/or manage whatsoever engineering science solution.
Ensure yous will see a return on your investment in whatsoever technology you lot buy.
Consider the 80/20 rule or Pareto principle equally yous work on efficiency. For example, fixing the top 20 percentage of inefficient processes may better 80 percent of your process problems.
Evaluate vendor-delivered, cloud-based solutions that are agile, extendable, mobile-friendly, and configurable to your specific needs.

Glossary of Terms

Streamlining: The process of making an organization of system more efficient past implementing simple and more agile approaches.

Task: A single piece of work that needs to exist completed.

Process(es): A series of tasks or activities that need to be completed in order to meet an terminate goal.

Business Processes: A series of tasks or activities that are used in a business environment and need to exist completed in order to encounter an end goal.

Breezy Business Processes: A process that occurs without much thought or planning.
Formal Business Processes: A process that is documented.

Workflow: A sequence of processes that have piece of work from commencement to completion.

Documentation: Materials available online, on paper, or on digital or analog media that include information or information.

Business organisation Procedure Management (BPM): An operations management discipline that views concern processes every bit an important nugget that must exist managed and clearly developed in order to deliver value.

Business organization Process Management (BPM) Strategy: An approach to identifying, designing, implementing, analyzing, monitoring, regulating, and improving business processes.

Business Process Automation: The act of using technology to automate business processes.

Business Process Comeback: The act of analyzing and improving business processes. This may include automating, eliminating steps, adding tasks, or eradicating a procedure all together.

Quality Assurance (in process automation): Testing each stage of a process to ensure the desired level of effectiveness is achieved.

Business organization Process Mapping: Identifying everyone and everything involved in a process. The goal of procedure mapping is to identify areas that tin can exist improved.

Concern Process Modeling: The act of benchmarking current processes with futurity goals. Visual documentation is used to clearly sympathise and analyze the activities, events, and resources associated with a process. Business process modeling incorporates process mapping, process discovery, and process simulation.

Business Procedure Modeling and Notation (BPMN): A standard for business process modeling that diagrams a procedure in graphical form.

Business concern Procedure Reengineering (BPR): A strategy that focuses on analyzing, designing, and restructuring business processes to dramatically amend operations.

Digital Transformation: The transformation of organizational activities to leverage digital technology opportunities in all areas of business organisation.

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