Successful Strategic Execution Business Processes Must Be Addressed to Achieve Desired Results

Business processes exist in every business from paying invoices to delivering the products or services. However identifying, documenting and enforcing these sequential step by step course of actions appear to be the last concern for many firms and is the biggest productivity drainer not to mention the loss to the bottom line.

The word process has Latin origins from the word proceed which means "to go forward." Process is often used interchangeably with the word system; however they do not mean the same thing. "System" from its Greek roots means to set together. From an organizational perspective, the system is the plan while the process is the action necessary to make the plan work.

One way to determine if such actions are truly moving forward is to listen for one of these two frequently made remarks:

1. "This is how we have always done it."
2. If it ain't broke, why fix it?"

When I hear these words, I usually know that:

• The process has not been recently been reviewed
• There is probably no documentation of the actions
• Change and innovation are not on the immediate landscape

Another area where there is failure is within performance appraisals. A lot of organizations say they are performance driven, but when you look at the job descriptions to the actual performance appraisal process there exists numerous gaps. When gaps happen, there is backward movement happening. The result continues the drain on productivity not to mention profits.

With some small business owners looking to the future and possibly selling their enterprises, the lack of process documentation is a real deal breaker to making the sale. What I share with my clients is that when you open your business you should plan on selling you business. Document all of your daily operations actions from billing to following all sales leads. Challenge how you have done it (whatever actions you take on a daily basis) to make sure your processes are both efficient (doing things right) and effective (doing the right thing). Business training coaching tip: Succession leadership planning is a must for any organization from the micro to the macro.

Business processes or would you prefer the phrase Systems Operations are continually evolving because change is happening at whirlwind speed. How you move forward today will potentially change in the next 6 months to 2 to 5 years. Again, you must be ahead of the flow instead of being in the flow if you wish to not only to survive, but also to thrive.

Business Process Reengineering When to Use It

As companies grow and establish themselves, over time they will have developed a set of processes that are specific to their core business. This set of processes is what defines the company and how it runs their operations. It becomes almost predictable. These processes may be very well suited to run every day activities, and may even be sufficient to cope with changes in the markets they are operating in, however eventually the pace of their competitors and the markets will outrun them. That is, if they do not adapt accordingly and swiftly to these ever present and continuous changes. They will start to notice that they are no longer performing as efficiently as they were doing when they founded the organization.

For an organization to remain competitive or even lead in the markets in which they operate, it is vital to analyze if the foundation on which it was built and as it was once laid out, is still a good match to the current landscape they are in. The methods which have been developed and most likely extended during their existence may need to be reviewed, analyzed and re-built, as they lose efficiency.

This is where Business Process Reengineering - many times abbreviated to BPR - steps in. It is an analytic thinking which helps to understand and view how one can optimize the processes on which the company is built. In other words, optimizing them to today's market conditions, and clearly also to those of tomorrow. Although sometimes people tend to refer to this endeavor as improvement of business processes, for it to be really effective, reengineering is a technique that is way more dramatic than just improving existing processes; it is a complete redesign. This extensive and impactive exercise recognizes and analyzes the core processes, the goals it is trying to achieve, the services and products, and the customers and stakeholders. It will then re-align the business processes to these areas of focus.

The analysis is generally carried out on a broad and wide range of processes, ideally all processes of the enterprise. The reason for doing so is because the intention of the exercise is to make major improvements in the company's presence by incorporating changes that will strip inefficiency from the entire set of processes, i.e. in its totality. This will lead to results with more impact than when assuming an approach of parallel processes being analyzed and optimizing each of them separately and independently. The real and major benefit of the entire undertaking is that by applying a broader and more holistic view, the changes will be bigger than optimizing each process on its own.

Business Process Management Solutions

In designing an environment for the effective performance of individuals working together in groups, a manager's most essential task is to see that everyone understands the groups purposes and objectives and its method of attaining them. If group effort is to be effective, people must know what they are expected to accomplish. This is a function of business process management solutions. Planning plays a pivotal part in attaining the solutions.

Planning involves selecting missions and objectives and the actions to achieve them. It requires decision-making, choosing from among alternative future courses of action. Plans provide a rational approach to pre-selected objectives. Planning bridges the gap from where we are to where we want to go. It makes it possible for things to occur that would not otherwise happen. Although we can seldom predict the exact future, and although factors beyond our control may interfere with the best-laid plans, unless we plan, we are leaving events to chance.

Business process management solutions are an intellectually demanding process. They require that we consciously determine courses of action and base our decisions on purpose, knowledge and considered estimates. Any attempt to control without plans is meaningless, since there is no way for people to tell whether they are going where they want to go (the result of the task of control) unless they first know where they want to go (part of the task of planning). Plans thus furnish the standards of control.

The failure of some managers to recognize that there are a number of different types of solutions has often caused difficulty in making planning effective. It is easy to see that a major program, such as one to build and equip a new factory, is a plan. But a number of courses for future action are also plans. In fact, a plan can encompass any number of courses of future action that clearly show that plans are varied.

Business Process Outsourcing Management

Business process outsourcing (also known as BPO) management is crucial to the development of a business if done right. We are basically talking about a special type of outsourcing that will contract just a part of the business functions or responsibilities of a company. For instance, a business process outsourcing company might be responsible for the management of articles in a content writing business. Although BPO can relate to a number of things, nowadays we usually use it to describe service outsourcing.

When talking about business process outsourcing management we are referring to the management of BPO in any company. Business process outsourcing can be divided in 2 main categories:

- Back office BPO - linked with different possible internal functions of a business like finance, accounting, human resources and so on - Front office BPO - linked with services connected with customers

When people talk about business process outsourcing management that is done through the services of a company that is based in another country we must use the term "offshore outsourcing". It is very common to mistake regular BPO with offshore BPO due to the use of outsourcing.

We need to understand that BPO management is really a big field of activity. For instance, in India alone we are talking about over 11 billion US dollars in revenues generated by offshore activities done for other countries. Very big profits have also been recorded in South Africa, Egypt, Philippines, Morocco and Eastern Europe. As a total figure we can say that the entire BPO market is currently worth over $150 billion.

Why Business Process Outsourcing Management?

The biggest advantage that comes from BPO stands in flexibility. By outsourcing we are faced with a more flexible working environment that eventually builds up more time and bigger profits. It is quite easy to find an outsourcing company that will work cheaper than the local market, all at the same quality level. Also, if we take away some business functions from a company we are faced with a better work flow and a better focus on the internal activities. This basically translates in an increase competency of the core of the company.

The bottom line is that business process outsourcing management can easily increase the growth of a small business and even a bigger business. At the end of the day it is important to understand this and even try to incorporate it in your own business. It is basically impossible not to find the right BPO Company to handle your outsourced needs. All that you need is a good outsourcing strategy and profits can constantly rise.

Business Process Outsourcing Companies What Can They Offer My Business

Business process outsourcing (BPO) has been around for a while. For a long time business process outsourcing companies have recognized the need for companies to outsource some of their less specialized processes in order to cut costs. This sector saw rapid growth in the last decade due to the rapid increase in competition across the sectors. In order to stay competitive companies were forced to find the cheapest way of doing things. This period of rapid growth led to the formation of many specialized business process outsourcing companies.

An ideal example of successful BPO is in the customer service sector. Almost every company that provides their customers with a service needs to have a customer service channel. In most case this channel is either through the phone or e-mail. In a lot of cases it is far cheaper, and more effective, for a company to use a business process outsourcing company to fulfill this need than to handle the task in-house.

By using BPO companies for these non specialized processes, companies are able to significantly decrease their costs - and in most cases, greatly improve their service. Due to the fact that the staff that they use to fulfill their clients needs specialize in the particular process that is involved, the standard is often significantly higher. The customer service example is ideal for representing this point. If a company's customer service helpline is handled by a specialist customer service provider, then in most cases the time taken to resolve each query, the quality of the service and the efficiency of the whole process will be of a higher standard than if it was handled in-house.

Business process outsourcing companies are able to fulfill a wide range of non specific services. Whether the process you want to outsourcing is as common as accounting or customer service enquiries, or a little more specialized, like medical transcription or HR management, business process outsourcing companies are likely to be able to fulfill your business needs.

Clearly, the larger the company the more potential benefits BPO offers. The larger the company, the more non-specialized processes they have a requirement for. Business process outsourcing companies are able to offer tailor made solutions based on a clients brief to offer the best results possible. In the large majority of cases these results not only provide significant decreases in costs for the client, but also a greatly improved service.

Challenges Do You Face in Business Process Improvement

Anytime you introduce change in an organization, challenges can arise. Business Process Improvement (BPI) is no different. Whenever a process changes, you can expect push back from someone! So, what are the different challenges you might face and how can you overcome them?

1. Prioritizing the work: When multiple opportunities exist, you may find it hard to identify the biggest opportunity. On NBC's The Biggest Loser, you can easily see who has the biggest problem! You can accomplish the same thing with business processes by building a Process Prioritization Matrix.

Merge your list, or inventory, of processes and prioritization criteria into a single spreadsheet, using the rows to list the business processes and using the columns to list the criteria. If you do not have criteria established to help you prioritize, identify some by thinking about the impact, current state, and value of the existing processes as a starting point. Begin your improvement efforts with the highest scoring process.

2. Avoiding scope creep: Once you begin working on a single business process, you can easily veer away from the original focus of the work. Have you ever started a project at home and then you find that one thing leads to another? This happens all the time in BPI work because new ideas, demands, and needs surface as you get into the work, and the temptation is to continually expand the scope of a BPI effort.

Before you begin working on improving a business process, establish a foundation for your work. Similar to building a house, where the foundation carries the weight of the entire structure, the process "blueprint" will help you to avoid scope creep. While you can do this in various ways, I find it helpful to create a one-page document that includes, at a minimum:

• a description of the process that anyone can understand
• the process boundaries (where the process begins and ends)
• the customer and their needs
• a list of the measurements of success

3. Getting people engaged: In the perfect world, you have sponsorship for BPI, but this does not always exist. Colleagues may not see "what's in it for me," or you may not have a culture of improvement in your organization.

Employees have to "own" process improvement to achieve sustained success because that is where the POWER of business process improvement lies! Until everyone in an organization sees BPI as part of their normal day-to-day responsibilities, process improvement will always come and go.

While managers clearly have a role (they are employees too), their responsibility lies in creating the right environment for process improvement. The problem with this idea though is that many managers got to where they are today because of their ability to deliver results as individual contributors.

All managers should list BPI on their annual performance plan and have part of their year-end review focused on their achievements in this area. They cannot view BPI as an "event" that they can check off though - it is a process, like anything else!

4. Handling difficult people: During any BPI effort you will encounter someone you probably wish would "go away." You may wonder why they resist the change or display a negative behavior.

You should discover the source of your colleague's concern. Forget about BPI for a minute, and try to identify what the person values and then match the benefits of BPI to those values. For example, if a colleague values job security, then you have to show him or her how BPI will enable them to keep their job - perhaps by doing more value added work. Once you match outcomes to values, you can overcome almost any challenge.

5. Changing priorities: As new management enters an organization, priorities can shift. So how can you stay focused on BPI?

The key is to stay focused on the customer. If a new manager comes in that only seems to care about the bottom line, take time to explicitly link "BPI," "customers," and the "bottom line" together. Only customers contribute to a company's profits and keep this concept at the core of everything you do.

6. Criticizing your Improvement Technique: Sometimes colleagues would rather use another improvement method than the one you chose. You may face the dilemma of which one has a better reputation at your computer. Is it Lean, Six Sigma, Reengineering, Lean Six Sigma, or something else?

In reality, most improvement techniques come down to "quality." All the techniques have the same goal -- to achieve improvements in delivering a product or service to the customer, and all have a connection to the Total Quality Management (TQM) movement. While the various techniques have some differences, you will see more similarities than differences. You should feel free to take the best from several techniques, combine them, and select a name that works for your organization.