Electronic Document Management News

Why Analyzing and Documenting Business Processes is Important 

In simplest terms, business process analysis is conducted in order to enhance your current organization or department by understanding it more fully. We evaluate our business processes to identify bottlenecks, duplicated efforts, or to document current operations and how they can be improved. This is what business process management (BPM) is all about and how business process improvement starts!

Many organizations think their business processes are just fine.  However, it never hurts to analyze what you are doing.  Here’s why:

Accountability
Ask yourself: Are your current business processes accomplishing or exceeding what is expected? By looking at each process individually, you can answer this question. Where is the breakdown in the process resulting in tasks not being completed quickly and efficiently?

Development and Improvement
There is always room for improvement. Process evaluations can pinpoint exactly where processes can be improved by identifying problems, duplications and more. As your competition gets stronger, you need maximum efficiency from your processes. Continuously reviewing will help wring the last little bits of inefficiencies out. Your competitive advantage can include how fast  and error free your processes are. Wal-Mart delivers its goods from suppliers to stores more efficiently than anyone. This is a huge competitive advantage for them.

Set an Example
Let’s say the accounts payable department performs a thorough evaluation of its processes and streamlines the processes creating a major success and savings for the department. While drawing a flow chart of the accounts payable process, they discover that the AP clerk touches an invoice 8 times. Wow! Why are they touching it that much?

It turns out, that it was the only way to keep the paper invoice moving through the process and also to keep track of it. The clerk was keeping a spreadsheet with the progress of each invoice being recorded as it was hand carried to the next step. The AP department decided to automate this process with automated workflow. Now the clerk actually does AP work instead of transporting invoices. The workflow moves the invoice from step to step and also records it progress for anyone to see.

Efficiency by evaluating and improving your processes, you will be able to deliver more, better, faster and cheaper.

Transparency
Your organization will have the ability to know the outcome of processes. You will now be able to identify obstacles and have the means to assess and improve. Transparency also includes knowing the status of something at any point in time. If a vendor wants to know where their invoice is in the approval process, you will be able to tell them. If your boss wants to know where a contract is, and you are not available, he can easily find it.

Adaptability
By having your processes evaluated and defined, the ability to adapt to a changing economy is much easier. Now that you know how information flows through your organization, you are able to better recover or adjust when needs change or problems arise.

A thorough evaluation of your organization’s business processes is a crucial, contributing phase to business process management. You cannot automate what you don't know.

According to Nathaniel Palmer, Editor-in-Chief of bpm.com, “BPM will be recognized as the definitive source of sustainable competitive advantage for almost every medium to large enterprise.”

With that being said, you can see that BPM is a powerful means of managing your business. For more information on BPM, please visit “What are Business Process Management and Workflow?”  

In BPM, the systematic documentation of processes is one of the vital factors to a successful evaluation. Documentation must set forth the competitive priorities, operations strategy, process choices and major related processes. Inputs, outputs and customers of the process all must be identified.

During the documentation phase of BPM, you are identifying the “as is” state and designing the “to be” state. As you begin to document and identify, you must be clear and concise. You can use flow charts, simulation models and process charts to accurately represent the current company processes. Diagnose how every document or piece of information flows through management, staff, employees and customers. Lack of documentation not only implies performance loss, but also insufficient information for process improvement, it also leads to mistakes.

Failing to carefully document and evaluate processes will, in the long run, result in dissatisfied customers, decreased efficiency, less productivity and savings lost.

If you want to improve your business processes and need to start mapping them, check out our Business Process Mapping Special Offer.

The Customer is the "Real Deal"!

•    The document management system chosen
•    The vendor behind the system
•    And most often overlooked: the customer!

In numerous articles, we consistently state that user involvement is one of the most important success factors.  Our customers know this is true!

DocuVantage Talk: What's The Latest?

Keep up-to-date on what DocuVantage has to say about the online document management industry, current events, company updates and more! Subscribe to the DocuVantage blog or follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/DocuVantage.

Recent Posts Include:

• SaaS Document Management Series: #8. Implementation is Easy. Daily Use is Even Easier. Just Go To Your Browser!
• PRESS RELEASE: Document Management, Cost and High Volume Document Capture are No Longer Barriers to Productivity 
• Thinking About Giving Your Employees the Option to Work From Home?
• SaaS Document Management Series: #7. Be Prepared For the Unexpected.