When your business isn’t performing as you feel like it should be, it can be frustrating and discouraging. Business leaders tend to overlook one of the biggest problems in the organization: how they’re doing things. The processes are probably killing productivity in most businesses, and this is especially true of larger ones and more established ones, where the same processes have been relied on year after year and decade after decade.
Consider the example of manual invoice processing. It’s a series of steps, all of which are tedious and cumbersome. In the end, even after the process is complete, the result is often human error, mismanagement of human capital, and high expenses. That’s the best case scenario.
There are solutions to help. For example, in the case of invoice processing, AP automation can be like a miracle if you’ve been doing the process manually all along.
To get buy-in from everyone in an organization about the importance of cutting out unnecessary, redundant or cumbersome processes, they need to recognize there’s a problem, however.
The following are some ways processes are likely hurting your business.
Maintaining Silos
Silos within a business, no matter the industry or the number of employees, are damaging. It’s extremely difficult for an organization with a lot of silos in place to be competitive in any real way. With silos, there’s not only the problem of inefficiency and the blocks in workflow, but there’s not going to be as much innovation when there are these roadblocks in place.
Silos tend to take up a massive amount of resources in an organization as well.
Key ways to eliminate silos is by working on maintaining a culture and processes that embrace transparency and openness.
When there are solutions that can connect everything in an organization while also providing visibility, it does wonders for eliminating the troublesome silos.
A Lack of Systems Integration
Even if a company has great technology and software in place that’s intended to help promote efficiency and reduce outdated workflows, if this technology isn’t all integrated and working with one another, it’s essentially pointless.
When different systems and applications aren’t designed to communicate with one another, burdensome processes are still in place because employees have to move back and forth between the systems and there’s no way to see what’s happening in a centralized way.
Lack of Real-Time Data
Another issue aside from having technology and systems that don’t integrate smoothly with one another is the problem that comes with a lack of real-time data. Even if a company has the resources to collect data and analytics, how are they using them? Are they delivered and even utilized in real-time? If not, the processes in the business aren’t as efficient as they could be.
If there is no way to derive insights at all, then this is an entirely separate problem.
Data and insight-related processes that require employees to wait to receive the information they need to make decisions is problematic. Then, if there are further processes in place that move the data from person to person or department or department before it’s used make it even less effective to put that data to work ultimately.
Redundancy
Redundancy is such a broad word, but it’s likely killing your businesses’ bottom line and competitiveness in any place where it exists. If you have employees going over the same things twice, you’re losing time and money.
When there is too much processing going on in any area, then it is drawing multiple people’s attention to something that could very likely be handled by one person.
Lack of Employee Autonomy
Finally, in organizations where employees feel like they have to adhere to rigid and traditional ways of doing things and there’s an extreme hierarchy, it’s likely that a whole lot of nothing is getting done. Employees may feel like they don’t have the opportunity to branch out and do things in a more effective, innovative or streamlined way.
They may spend most of their asking for permission rather than moving toward the objectives they’re supposed to meet, but maybe doing so in a different way outside of traditional processes.
By promoting employee autonomy, you can get free-thinkers who don’t waste hours, days or weeks waiting for their questions to go through channels of bureaucracy. They are likely to get to a viable solution to a problem or derive important insights much faster, and they’ve cut out all the in-between.