Business Process Optimization (BPO) strategy
What’s the best way to increase productivity and reduce costs in a business? Better task
prioritization? Minimizing cost overrun? Moving to a hybrid working model? While all these
ideas can help, they’re not the best way to get more done while cushioning your bottom line.
The truth is, making huge changes to the way your staff work day-to-day, such as introducing a
work-from-home policy, matters very little if your business’s processes are outdated, slow, and
reliant on offline work. Issues with non-optimized processes can affect any area of your business,
from sales to IT.
If a core team’s access to the company’s server is disconnected with no way of IT remedying the
issue, work throughout the company could grind to a hold. Likewise, if the sales and marketing
teams don’t have a defined process for sharing key information, how are they meant to work
together effectively? The best way to resolve these issues is through business process
optimization.
Business process optimization can seem like a complex topic, but it’s really quite
straightforward. Let’s break it down.
What is business process optimization?
Business process optimization, also known as BPO, focuses on improving a business’s efficiency
by optimizing its core processes in a targeted and rigorous manner. BPO can be applied to both
internal and external processes, as well as singular processes and individual departments.
However, it works best when an organization makes an effort to improve its processes across the
board.
Steps in Process Optimization
Use this business process optimization framework to get started:
Step 1: Identify and analyze the process that needs to be optimized
Start by identifying which process needs to be optimized and why. These processes will usually
share qualities like:
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Data or collaboration silos
Problems with handoffs
Clogged throughputs that delays outputs.
Rework or redundancies.
Errors due to manual data processing or inputs.
Any issues with collaboration or communication that can be easily solved by retooling
existing resources.
Step 2: Set KPIs
In order to understand whether the optimizations you’ve identified are creating the results you
want, it’s important to establish key performance indicators. This helps keep track of
optimizations, measure whether they’ve improved the efficiency of your process(es), and create
data-driven recommendations for any additional optimizations or improvements.
Step 3: Rework processes and existing resources
This is where the work really begins. With issues/gaps and optimizations now identified, it’s
time to implement them. Here is what that may look like:
Step 4: Monitor and measure optimizations
Once optimizations have been made, it’s time to monitor and measure them based on the KPIs
established in Step 2. If communication and collaboration improve, bottlenecks decrease, and
output increases, then the optimizations have worked. But if the optimizations are falling short,
then it’s time to review and get to the root of the issue.
Step 5: Repeat as needed
As you optimize your business processes, make it a common practice to repeat and rework as
needed and where needed. As business processes evolve, the optimizations that once worked
may no longer apply.