Is your organization bleeding time and resources? Do simple processes like locating documents frustrate your team?
The average tenure of companies on the S&P 500 is shrinking fast — meaning your business needs to constantly evaluate operations and sharpen its competitive edge to stay relevant. You can’t afford to let manual data entry and outdated processes detract from business innovation.
That’s where Business Process Improvement (BPI) can help. By integrating applications, restructuring operational resources and upgrading software throughout your organization, you can drastically improve efficiency and free staff to focus on more strategic projects.
But how do you know which processes to attack first? A business process improvement assessment exposes where the real operational gaps exist and gets you on the path to smoother operations.
What is a business process improvement assessment?
Your team might gripe about a recurring issue — like frequent billing errors or slow project turnaround times.
A business process improvement assessment validates the pain points your team experiences and uncovers larger operational performance gaps that need to be addressed.
The goal of a BPI assessment is to identify inefficiencies to increase performance and spark business growth. An outside firm is often the best candidate for conducting a BPI assessment because they lack biases and can evaluate processes from an organizational level.
Restructuring operations and improving business processes is a critical (but often ignored) way to stay competitive. By automating processes, integrating systems and introducing new technology, you save on manual labor hours, which directly impacts your bottom line.
What happens during a business process improvement assessment?
A business process improvement assessment will look different in each organization.
At MXOtech, our BPI assessment is a low-cost, two-week audit that reveals the path for your systems and processes to work more effectively for your core business.
During the BPI assessment, a consultant comes onsite to interview key staff members and become fully entrenched in their roles. The consultant reviews and documents your current processes, systems and resources and determines solutions that will provide a higher return on investment of time, resources and workflow, than is currently in place.
After the analysis, the consultant delivers a road map document detailing recommended approaches as well as the pros and cons of each. Once you determine the best approach, the consultant will present a high-level plan that can be executed on your own or with a vendor.
Before committing to a BPI plan, you need to define the problems your organization is facing. Do employees spend too much time on manual data entry? Do you have to collect data from disparate systems that don’t integrate?
Whatever your challenges, a BPI assessment is the first step to streamlining processes.
6 signs your organization needs a BPI assessment
You're experiencing business pains. But how do you know a BPI assessment makes sense for your organization? Here are six key signs your company might be a good candidate.
1. Your access database has become difficult to use
Access databases are useful for companies with minimal data needs. But if you have more than 2GB of data or more than 20 users, you’re guaranteed to experience limitations.
An access database restricts your capacity to grow and makes it difficult to scale your business. If multiple users need to gain access to the database or you have remote users, performance and response time will suffer.
If you store sensitive data like medical records, financial information or employment data, access databases also don’t offer the level of security you need.
A BPI assessment will uncover inefficiencies within your data processes. The road map will detail all potential solutions and avenues — from commercially available software to custom web applications — that will create a more agile structure for a multi-user environment.
2. You rely on paper forms or Excel spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are perfect for simple data entry and quick analysis tasks, but managing complex data within spreadsheets can be tedious and counterproductive. When building reports and collecting data from various spreadsheets, your team wastes valuable time.
Spreadsheets also lack controls, making them susceptible to human error and fraud. Non-IT employees often manage spreadsheets and aren’t familiar with storage and backup best practices. If major a disaster strikes, full data recovery can be nearly impossible.
A BPI assessment will provide a framework to move your data away from spreadsheets into a new system or custom application. You will gain greater control of your data and save time and labor costs.
3. Your team performs manual data entry across critical business systems
Do you receive data from outside sources that must be manually entered into a separate system? Manual data entry puts you at risk for human error.
A small mistype often leads to inaccurate records and disorganization. It can take countless hours to fix one mistake and compromise customer trust.
Manual data entry is also costly. Time spent on data entry is time spent away from clients, projects and profitable business activities.
MXOtech recently performed a business process improvement assessment for MSO Great Lakes, a hospice organization in Illinois.
Each month, clinical staff manually copied thousands of pieces of data from its EMR system into a complex case management web portal for a major health insurer. The organization risked possible data entry errors and paid employees overtime to meet deadlines for this program.
The MXOtech integration team created a standard export format for MSO Great Lakes that was compatible with its EMR system. This integration eliminated potential missed deadlines, data entry errors, and saved the team hundreds of hours each year.
4. You need to replace a core software program
All software programs become outdated over time. If you’re looking to migrate to new software, a BPI assessment can help you determine which program best fits your needs and budget.
During the assessment, your consultant will outline software and applications that align with your organizational requirements and will document the optimal roadmap for a smooth transition.
5. You have systems that need to talk to each other
Do you have systems that share information? Do you need smart logic to help these systems communicate and a backend database that can produce reports?
Say you’re a painting company that relies on an accounting system to create bids and depends on separate systems to build project plans that are delivered to field employees.
Instead of manually entering project specs into multiple systems, a business process improvement assessment would provide a solution that automatically generates project details from an accounting system for field employees.
6. Employees or customers repeatedly complain about the same issue
Employees might think they know the source of their frustration. But larger organizational forces could be at play. A BPI assessor is detached from daily tasks and evaluates the bigger picture.
Through extensive stakeholder interviews, a third-party BPI Assessor can identify systemic roadblocks and recommend a solution that saves everyone time and headaches.
Smoother procedures and a more efficient workflow also mean greater employee and customer satisfaction, leading to higher productivity and increased return on your technology investment.
Streamline processes with a low-cost BPI assessment
A BPI assessment will uncover opportunities to integrate various systems and eliminate the need for repetitive manual data entry, as well as the risk of inaccurate data.
By extensively reviewing human processes, technology, and operational performance gaps, you can expose opportunities to reduce manual data entry and free your team to focus on business strategy.
At MXOtech, our BPI assessment uncovers your largest organizational inefficiencies and determines the best potential technology solution(s) or process changes. We’ve helped companies across all industries reduce costs, improve performance and operate more effectively through Business Process Improvement.
Still unsure whether your organization is a good candidate for a BPI assessment? Contact us today to schedule a free review with a BPI specialist.