What is Business Process? – Types, Benefits, and Examples

Just like any other process, business processes also need you to be clear about what outcomes you want to achieve. This would help you create the base of your process and give it a suitable direction. Attach some quantitative metrics to your objective, so that you can find out the results after implementation.

E.g., Let’s assume you have a courier business, and you want to prepare a business process for your delivery guys. Your objective might be to decrease the traveling time by 30 mins of each of your delivery guys. You must define this objective and take all the further steps to achieve this objective.

2. Creating and analyzing alternatives

Once you have defined what exactly you want as an outcome, half of the problem is solved. Now you need to create all the alternatives that you can come up with. There will be an opportunity loss attached to each of these alternatives. The task is to find the most suitable option with the least opportunity cost.

E.g., There are multiple solutions to decrease the traveling time of your delivery boys like dividing them into shifts, giving them skateboards, setting their routes in a way they don’t need to detour, but only a few of them will be suitable and feasible. Choose the best out of all of them.

3. Involve and assign stakeholders

This is one of the most critical steps in creating a business process. Once you have designed the process out of all the alternatives, you must involve everyone and make them understand the process. They are directly involved in the running of the process. That is why it is necessary that they understand all the aspects of the process. This would help you save time in the longer run.

4. Test the process

After the process is entirely designed, you must run it on a smaller scale. The practical experience would help you find the gaps that you missed while creating the process. You can fill these small gaps with solutions and make your process official.

5. Run the process

After filling out all the gaps and solving all the minute inconveniences, you should implement the process to your business. Since the stakeholders of the processes know about it, the chances of discrepancies will be reduced to a minimal.

6. Analyze the results

When you designed the process, you had an objective in your mind. Now that you have implemented it, have you been able to achieve the results that you were planning to get? You need to draw a comparison between the earlier process and the current one. The quantitative metric would help you with that.

E.g., You can compare the time taken by your delivery man before and after the implementation of the process. This would give you an idea of whether you were able to achieve the desired results or not.

If the results are achieved, you are good to go. The process that you have created is working effectively. If they are not, you need to change something, either make your objectives more achievable or make your process more efficient. In short, go for the optimizing the business process. With enough trials and errors, you will be able to achieve optimum results.