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How do you improve business efficiency in the face of constant disruption? We share two things that benefit companies most when it comes to business efficiency.
As a result of the past many years of economic uncertainty, caused by things like the global pandemic, a shifting geopolitical landscape, and the war in Ukraine, many companies have increased their focus on operational efficiency especially to ensure their ability to continue operations under a broad range of circumstances.
But what is the best way to ensure that your business is running as efficiently as possible?
There’s probably already a few areas you wish would operate more smoothly, but there’s a difference between ‘nice-to-have’ improvements to business efficiency and making sure that the areas most critical to your operations are running under extreme circumstances.
The current political climate coupled with what feels like annual disruptions to the supply chain, has shown that we need to constantly expect the unexpected, and be prepared to face serious challenges to our operations and business processes.
At Encodify, we have worked with improving business efficiency since the early 2000’s, specifically through automation of business processes that lead to a reduced time to market, fewer approval rounds, more precise compliance processes, improved quality of marketing collateral, reduced production costs, and more precision and commercial agility in promotion.
In this article we will share two things that we know benefit companies most in terms of business efficiency.
Business efficiency is the relationship between input—the resources a company requires in order to operate—and output—the volume at which it produces goods or services. Simply put, business efficiency is how much money goes into a company to keep its cash flow positive.
In business management terms efficiency can be divided into several subcategories:
While you could look at any subcategory of business efficiency, we suggest you focus on your process efficiency over other areas. And by process efficiency we mean the things that ensure that you meet the desired results or output—that you reach your goals at the right cost and on time.
The reason we use process efficiency as the starting point for improving business efficiency in general is that processes are often the place in business with the most impact. A good process can make your operations exponentially faster, and a bad process can grind your operations to a halt.
This is due to the repetitive nature of processes. Your processes are repeated day after day tens, hundreds or even thousands of times, which means that a one second improvement quickly adds up.
Looking at the business processes we’ve helped optimize over the past two decades, there are two steps that almost all businesses can take to optimize their process efficiency, and they have proved, time and time again, to yield quick improvements with very small effort.
If you think of business processes as the engine that propels your business forward, you also need to realize that, like any other engine, it needs regular maintenance and service checks.
While it is often tempting to leave a process on its own once it’s been defined, documented, and implemented, taking the time to audit your business processes can have a big pay off.
And all you need to do, is take another look at your existing workflows.Once you have mapped out your workflows, you will have a much better understanding of the current state of your business processes, and it lets you identify redundant tasks, bottlenecks, hold-ups, and areas with a high risk of error.
This gives you a foundation to improve your business efficiency.
Coming off the back of a process audit you will most likely have identified several areas of your processes that are not fully efficient, and the reason for many of these is likely that they are repetitive in nature and needs to be carried out manually—every time.
That’s where process automation comes in.
When we say automation, there’s a pretty good chance your mind either jumps to email marketing or AI but that’s not what we’re talking about here. Process automation in a business management context is the act of using workflow software to help execute recurring tasks or process steps.
The reason why automation is essential when you aim to improve your business efficiency is that it streamlines and standardizes your operations in a way that can never be achieved without it. And this frees up time and resources in your team that can be spent on more value-adding projects and work.
While it is true that there are several different subcategories of business efficiency, none of them are as pervasive to the overall effectiveness of your business as process efficiency.
This is in part due to the role processes have in structuring your operations.
Analyzing your key workflows and finding areas suited for automation will allow you to better use the resources you have, cut costs, and speed up your processes, resulting in an overall improvement to your business efficiency.
Additionally, improving your process efficiency through regular process audits and automation will help you be prepared for the next disruption that hits your business, simply because you will be able to adapt your process and workflows to match any challenge.
