Have you ever asked yourself the question: How are we going to improve quality of provided service? When this question comes to your mind, do you think about hiring better people?

What if the person changes the role within organization or leaves? You will again find hero employee?

And what about your processes? Have you ever tried to describe them? Does everyone in your company know what level of quality is expected by your customers? How long it takes you bring new employee on board?

Business Process Management

Ok, you found out you need to describe and standardize your processes, which will lead to assuring high level of provided services. But where to start?

Focus on what's important

You know that there are 20% processes generating 80% revenue? Think about the value you provide your clients. What's the highest benefit your clients get from your services? If you know where your strength is, go and describe the whole process. Do not forget even soft criteria, such as positive feeling received by your client in any interaction.

Describe & measure the key metrics

Do you handle your client requests on time? Do your customers get appropriate feedback? Are they satisfied with your support? Think about implementing solution for tracking client requests. Take care about each individual question being sent to your company. Don't forget to respond in reasonable time.

After some time, you would like to know, whether your effort put into process standardization has some impact on your client's satisfaction. You would like to know whether the quality, time & cost of the process increases or decreases. Implement measurable criteria and track your core processes. Track work time of your people, track response time or any criteria that is part of your core process.

Continual process improvement & re-design

Maybe because you started to measure the process execution, you would like to try to improve the process. You want to make it simpler? You found new opportunities during the process execution? Or you just experience poor performance?

Manual vs. automated process management

You found out what processes are important to you, your clients and your business and the fact you need to measure them in order to be able to improve them. And what about the form of their application to reality? Is 20 page manual enough? Can you handle the amount or requests with XLS spreadsheet? How do you force your rules to be consistently executed? Can you measure the process? Are you effective in fulfilling your routine tasks? Are all your people involved properly?

Think about implementing better system. Think about solution that will fulfill basic process management requirements:

• can easily hook to other systems - (SOA: Service Oriented Architecture will help you once you want to connect the solution to other systems dynamically)
• have process management support tools integrated - (have independent but tightly connected Workflow module, have custom-based forms designer, etc.)
• have collaboration tools integrated - (once messaging, message boards & other forms of communication is integrated, you do not need to take care about their later integration)
• have knowledge storage capacity - (have at least searchable document library integrated)
• provide business analytics reporting - (have good reporting facility integrated)

Conclusion

Good enterpreuner is searching repeatable processes that provide high value to clients. Good enterpreuner also protects the business to be consistent and profitable. Join the Atollon Islanders Club, which is a group of enterpreuners all the time improving the way they lead their enterprises.