How to Optimize Processes: The Secret Sauce To Streamlining Your Business

This blog post will provide you with the fundamental knowledge and practices for analysing and optimizing processes in your organization.

We’ll shed light on the major factors behind process optimization, elaborate how they relate to business process automation, and tie inextricably to business transformation.

Process optimization refers to adopting structured methods, strategies, and technologies to improve a specific process within the parameters of a project or initiative. It aims to make the process more efficient, logical, and inexpensive while ensuring that important constraints are not violated.

Process optimization is important to streamline operations and maximize resource utilization in project management. It improves overall output, reduces waste, and minimizes errors. Optimizing processes is vital when managing multiple processes, leading to efficient and effective decision-making.

In times of fierce competition and continuous disruption, every business manager, process owner, department head, or team lead needs to stay on top of their operational processes, constantly. Optimal effectiveness and efficiency of key processes is essential to your competitive position, and many times is what makes all the difference between surviving and thriving in the business arena.

Today, process automation is many times referred to as the ‘silver bullet’ for achieving operational excellence – be it through low-code/no-code automation, or ERP systems. But what we often forget, is that not every process is fit for automation and businesses need to analyse their processes first to determine the optimization potentials and the best-fitting means for automation. This is particularly important since automation tends to magnify the inefficiencies, when applied to inefficient processes (more on this in our blog post on process automation steps).

That’s why identifying the problem areas and opportunities for improvement are vital first steps in refining your processes and realizing their full potential.

There’s a saying that the first leg of any process optimization initiative lies directly in the process’ documentation itself. And that’s very true. By noting down the steps, decision points, process paths, responsibilities, handovers etc., the process analysts can already identify the obvious weaknesses in the process design.

Oftentimes, the pure process documentation can already reveal that there is no one, clear process in place – but rather many variants, with tons of exceptions. Writing these processes down, or modelling them in a BPM tool, can already help you harmonize these variants and create transparency for all parties involved.  Alternatively, in the case of complex processes – and sufficient budget – process mining is another great approach for discovering how processes really run in your organization, thus delivering valuable input for subsequent analysis and optimization.

Well-documented processes typically easily unmask potentials for further optimization. And the goals of such optimization efforts may be:

• To minimize process execution time, cycle time, and/or cost

• To maximize throughput

• To reduce redundancies and inefficiencies

• To minimize manual intervention / non-standard processing (escalations)

• To maximize process quality (maximize the number of desirable outcomes; minimize process failures)

• To minimize process variants and further standardize the processes

• And alike

In order to realize one or many of these objectives, businesses are in need of a pragmatic, easy-to-execute procedure model for analyzing and optimizing of their business processes. Such procedure models can seamlessly be integrated into the existing management approaches, such as the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act), or – for organizations with an established process management practice – the Process Management Life Cycle (PMLC).

Example of BOC Group’s Process Management Life Cycle

Most organizations already have an idea about which processes require optimization – be it due to a high number of complaints from customers, a noticeable inefficiency due to endless cycle times, or an observation of repeating loops and escalations. Moreover, many companies also have regularly running process assessments, or might be doing analyses based on their process landscapes.

However, on top of clearly defining and stating the scope of your optimization initiative, it’s equally as important to narrow it down, before you specify the concrete objectives for the measure at hand. Do you intend to optimize the generic production process, or rather the production process of a specific good? Are all your submission-to-bind processes in scope for optimization at your insurance company? Or rather only the vehicle insurance business segment? Such a detailed scope definition is paramount, in order to determine who needs to be involved and ultimately to define the actual optimization measures themselves.

Lastly, when optimizing processes make sure that your targets are clearly defined and understood by everybody involved. Shall the processes in scope be optimized for quality, time or cost? What is the concrete target, and how can potentially conflicting interests be managed?

Finding the best path to optimize processes

For some of the analysis steps (especially quantitative ones), the numerical data is crucial and should be sourced through interviews, surveys, log file analysis on used applications, or through process mining.

Nevertheless, many of the analyses can already be done based on the “static” process models, i.e. the designed or discovered flow charts. In the table below, you’ll find a summary of 9 such best practice methods:

Many of these static analyses are manual and more qualitative in nature, whereas others rather emphasize the assessment of quantitative data. By enriching your process models with numerical information, you can complement your static analyses with dynamic assessment techniques, in order to examine additional information such as times, costs or process paths.

Process simulation is often the method of choice for this purpose – allowing you to mimic real-life scenarios and test your process times, costs and decisions based on recorded probabilities, as well as examine process results per path, or even for the entire process as a whole.

Example of process simulation results in ADONIS BPM tool

Such dynamic process analyses enable you to:

• Determine the number of process paths and their probabilities
• Identify your critical process paths, in terms of cycle times, processing times and frequency
• Find “costly” paths, and the paths that are in violation of the determined goals and service level agreements (SLAs), and improve / eliminate them
• Calculate the ratio between waiting times vs. cycle times, as well as the ratio between waiting times vs. execution time – the higher the ratio, the higher the optimization potential
• Detect “costly” tasks, find out why they take so long and how you could improve them e.g. through better IT support, automation/RPA, cheaper role executing the task, etc.
• Run personal capacity planning to determine the number of FTEs (full-time equivalents) and resources required
• Compare different process variants based of costs and cycle times, and prepare detailed cost/benefit and ROI calculations for sound decision-making

Incorporating quantitative analyses into your process evaluation can provide you with more tangible insights about your processes and how well, or efficiently they operate in reality – without disrupting the day-to-day business. Based on these assessments, you can adjust your processes in a targeted manner and thus give your process optimization a new boost.

The business competition bar is ever-rising and the importance of first-to-market, customer service, cost competitiveness, and quality are prevailing factors in determining an organization’s success, or undesirable downfall. Continuous business and process optimization are therefore no longer a choice, but a necessity for companies to stay ahead of the curve.

In this article, we’ve shared with you some our key insights and practices for streamlining of business processes, and discussed how analysis and optimization act as critical components in any automation initiative, or business transformation project as a whole. For a further deep-dive and exclusive look into some our lessons from experience, be sure to check out the process optimization webinar below.

And naturally, no business improvement initiative will fully prosper without a little help, whether it’s support from relevant stakeholders, or a smart tool that facilitates and empowers your optimization endeavors. With a BPM tool like our award-winning BPM suite ADONIS, you have an ideal companion to support you in all steps of your process’ lifecycle – from discovery and documentation, to optimization with graphical analyses, dynamic simulation, and beyond. Discover our BPM offering now and put your culture of continuous improvement in motion today!