The Importance of Business Process Optimization

Daniel Knoodle, CEO, Invictus Gurus and Robert Ennis, Head of Sales and Marketing, Invictus Gurus

The recent pandemic and current recession fears have forced businesses of all sizes to tighten their belts and find ways to reduce expenses. Many of our clients today are now considering ways to adopt Business Process Optimization strategies to help streamline operations, reduce costs and increase productivity and efficiency.

Business Process Optimization, or BPO, is the re-engineering and improvement of end-to-end business processes within an organization to achieve greater efficiencies and effectiveness. BPO services can be internal or external to an organization and typically, is a hands-on, direct involvement engagement between a company and its client(s) to understand the needs of the business better and to help clients implement new strategies, methods, and procedures leveraging new products, and solutions for sustainable, cross-organizational growth.

Business Process Optimization, or BPO, is the re-engineering and improvement of end-to-end business processes within an organization to achieve greater efficiencies and effectiveness.

There are three core stages of BPO. Assessment of current business processes gives an in-depth understanding of what is happening within your business. Your existing business processes are analyzed by professionals who identify improvements and gaps. Looking at not just what management believes is the process but what is being done by employees is crucial to assessing what processes are being used, bypassed, or worked around and why. This analysis will give you a clear picture of your business processes, how much manual/repetitive/duplicate work is being done, and where automation and improvements can catapult your organization to better efficiencies. The next step is creating a plan and blueprint detailing process changes and overall process flow to understand better how various processes across the organization impact one another. How are the results, outputs, etc., from one group being utilized by other groups? How can those be adjusted to align better and provide the information needed without repeated follow-up or additional work to use that information? The third step is implementation.

During implementation, various activities occur, such as installing new hardware or software, training employees, transferring data from old systems to new systems, systems integration, new tools or applications, and testing. As new tools, processes, applications, etc., are introduced, it's critical to follow through with individual users to understand how these changes are being implemented and what might need tweaking after implementation. The follow-through is where fine-tuning yields a much greater acceptance rate from employees and gives your organization a lasting improvement.

As we suggested in our article here last Summer, the objective of BPO is not to automate jobs or remove employees but rather to give employees core institutional knowledge and tools to scale and become more productive. Allowing the business to be more efficient, grow with existing headcount, and run more efficiently to improve their bottom line.

BPO solutions and techniques can be applied to any area within an organization, such as Operations, Human Resources, Manufacturing and Distribution, Finance, Sales and Field Services, Procurement, Supply Chain, Logistics, Customer Relationship Management, and more.

According to a Gartner annual survey, "almost half (42%) of CEOs reported that their digital ambition is linked to business optimization." ( source, Gartner, refreshed 23 September 2021, Published 7 April 2020.)

Business Process Optimization is the future of our ever-changing world. If you want your business to stay ahead of the curve, you must constantly look for ways to optimize your processes. Technology can be a helpful tool that allows your organization to respond quickly and automate busy work for employees. Optimizing your business processes allows your organization to save money, improve customer satisfaction, and increase employee morale—all of which will lead to a more successful business.

For example, recently and while conducting workshops and ideation sessions with one of our clients, we discovered a need to digitize the sales process and automate sales team workflows and quotes. The information provided by sales to inventory and manufacturing planning was causing significantly more work to be performed by other departments to fulfill orders. By integrating sales process tools with inventory and manufacturing automation, we dramatically reduced the manual work across multiple business units and expedited order processing. In turn, we provided our client with a highly improved order fulfillment process and customer experience. These enhancements enabled the sales team to dramatically reduce the time spent recording and processing orders and freed them up, to focus on customers and new opportunities.

In times of pending recession, custom tools and software solutions are a great way to cut costs, improve employee productivity and make your business more efficient and recession-proof. Most companies today must pay attention to the coming economic reality. As you plan for 2023 and beyond, looking for ways to improve your organization's bottom line and growth forecasts, you must recognize how critical BPO is for success. Improving existing business processes and giving employees tools to scale will be a critical pathway forward and give you a competitive edge in your industry.

It is time to consider all the ways Business Process Optimization can help your company evolve into the future and grow in an ever-evolving environment.