The Benefits of Business Process Analysis (+BPA Template)
Working business processes are imperative to achieving your goals. And Business Process Analysis (BPA) is how you keep them working.
Even though not a magic wand, process transparency — thanks to BPA — comes with a good deal of benefits to help your business thrive.
True, Business Process Analysis is not a magic tool which can change the top 10 problems in your process. But it can help you understand your business process in such a clear and visual way that you can start testing your own hypothesis.
Roel Schenk, Minit Global Implementation Lead
So, what are the most appealing Business Process Analysis (BPA) advantages?
(Not sure how to start your own BPA initiative? Download free Busines Process Analysis Template here.)
8 Benefits of Analyzing Business Processes in Your Organization
From process transparency to better cooperation and alignment to higher efficiency and improved relations with customers, regular BPA efforts bear the desired fruit.
1. Understanding the Process Deviations
Uncovering hidden details will give you insights into the actual flow of business processes and help you not only identify inefficiencies, exceptions, unusual transactions, bottlenecks, deviations, weaknesses, and risks, but also find their true causes.
By analyzing your processes, you can, for example, minimize rework and reduce the number of unnecessary, cumbersome, and tiring tasks that are not helping your bottom line.
2. Better Alignment on the Strategic KPIs and Communication
As your business expands, it becomes more difficult to manage the overall communication and cooperation and get desired KPIs, both horizontally and vertically — across different departments, branches, and all levels of the hierarchy.
Well-run business processes aid the management in controlling and steering the company and drive business results.
3. Fact-Based Transparency from Historical Data
In large companies, it’s difficult to monitor the performance of staff and track customers effectively. By analyzing your processes, you’ll not only track them but also identify how they affect your business.
4. Improved Documentation and Compliance
Thanks to BPA, you and your team will gain thorough documentation of the processes. It should result in better-functioning processes where all the parties involved know what they should be doing, while also providing more proper and faster onboarding to the new employees.
This also goes hand in hand with further compliance checking and evaluating to what extent your operations run according to pre-set rules, regulations, or any other requirements.
5. Revised Relations with Customers
Proper customer care and customer acquisition analysis will pinpoint weak spots of these processes and will lead you to the true causes of issues, so you can fix them.
Because, according to Gallup, “customers who are fully engaged represent 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth compared with the average customer.”
6. Powering Continuous Improvement and Innovation
Business Process Analysis also accelerates optimization and continuous improvement efforts. Real-time insights into actual business process steps create endless opportunities for improvement.
In our experience, the simplest changes — so-called low-hanging fruit — such as eliminating an unnecessary process step or introducing new guidelines increase the overall productivity (i.e. higher ROI), without the need to invest in new technology or make changes to existing systems within the company. That’s the next step.
7. Data-Based Insights for Decision Making
Most problems which arise with business processes are primarily due to the lack of transparency. Process-related dimension gives managers an insight to make the right decisions, as compared to “traditional” summed-up numbers.
For example, when a company wishes to improve its results, the managers are often asked to cut costs, and a common way is through layoffs. However, this should never happen without managers having data-based insights into individual performance or understanding of how losing a particular group of employees will affect the overall process.
8. Baseline for Digital Transformation
Business Process Analysis helps you identify key areas that need to be addressed when you are looking to implement new technology. When you analyze, optimize, and rethink each process before investing in Digital Transformation, you’ll reap large benefits in terms of better performance and saved costs.
5 Most Common Findings of a Business Process Analysis
1. Bottlenecks
Incorrect order of process steps, unnecessary steps, not following the right process flow, human errors, or wasteful allocation of workers and other resources, can halt or slow down the process at a particular stage, which will inevitably affect your business results.
2. Redundancy
Duplication of work occurs when different processes are joined together or when the process is designed to include redundant steps, which won’t add any value to the process (approval of something that’s checked by someone else). This leads to inefficiency and repetition of unwanted and unnecessary tasks.
3. Integration
It’s challenging to integrate legacy systems with the new solutions or even connect your current systems within a process. Inefficiently performing systems constitute a significant problem that leads to malfunctions and communication gaps.
4. Poor Organization
Another prominent issue with business process is lack of organization, which occurs mostly when employees are just loosely following rules without understanding why they are being asked to do things a certain way.
5. Process Complexity
As a company grows, processes tend to grow ever more complicated. As more and more systems are used, the process becomes too complicated for the stakeholders to have real insight into how things are happening.
Issues That Can Rise from Your Next Business Processes Analysis
Business processes are a critical element for a company’s growth. Yet poorly optimized, inefficiently executed, or faulty processes represent a risk of:
- Loss of performance and productivity
- Lagging production, faulty products, poor services
- Lost revenues, squandered resources
- Increased costs, inefficient distribution of work
- Security risks, fraud, compliance risks
- Poor customer satisfaction/service and clients leaving to competition
Our Global Implementation Lead, Roel Schenk, gives one example for all.
“P2P process lead time within a company suddenly became much higher and erratic. The company tried to analyze the problem but couldn’t find out what it was,” he says.
“So, they ran a Business Process Analysis via Process Mining and uncovered a massive list of orders which were approved on Friday afternoons. These orders should have been checked, and the approvals were late. When confronting the specific user, they heard that the person got a promotion, but his approval duties were not properly reassigned.”
Finding such a root cause is not an easy task without proper Business Process Analysis, right?
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The article was originally published on the Minit.io blog.
