Business Efficiency: What is it and Why is it Important? » beSlick

Once you’ve established that you have your fundamentals in place, you can move on to improving your processes. These are the key areas to concentrate on for business and financial efficiency improvements.  

Automation

Automation is currently the holy grail of process improvement. It’s only logical that simple, repetitive processes are better suited to machines than people. It’s equally obvious that AI can process more numbers per minute than a human can. 

Remember, though, that automation must happen after a process has been optimized manually, Automating a poor process just makes errors happen more quickly. 

Take this example, you choose to automate your invoicing process. The system can automatically generate invoices with correct products, pricing, etc. and send them out. All without intervention. 

Yet, if your customer information isn’t up to date, or there are errors, then the whole process falls apart as the invoice emails go nowhere. The human factor is just as important as the automation in making this process run smoothly. 

Improve team communication

We mentioned above that email overload is a chief contributor to work-related stress. Cut out unnecessary internal emails to massively reduce this load. If staff have an easy way to communicate, like an IM service, tasks can flow much more easily. 

Many process tracking platforms have integration for chat services built-in. They’ll help you to track, monitor, and record communications automatically as well. Internal business operations will run more smoothly with this ease of communication. 

Relating communication directly to work activity makes it easier to find related information. With software tools, it’s easy to group and sort communication into channels. You can use system integration to collate your communication data for ease of access and reporting. 

Invest in Task Management Software

As we showed above, technology can help your team be more productive. Task management software is a great way to keep your workload organized and streamlined. Planning and organizing tasks in advance keeps everyone working toward the same objective. 

Tracking your tasks in this way will also help you identify areas of workflow that are developing a backlog. These are the areas you should focus on first for process improvements. There are only so many hours in anyone’s work day, plan them efficiently.

Hold a quick daily standup

A brief morning stand-up meeting can help keep everyone on the same page. You can even use it to replace lengthy, unnecessary meetings that drain time and productivity. If you’re outlining the day’s focus, you don’t need a one-to-one dialogue.

Encourage managers to communicate with decision-makers directly to adjust daily requirements. You can implement a similar process for remote working. Although it’s harder to ensure attendance, you don’t need to make every morning meetup mandatory.