Process optimization, guide and realistic method

A process is a series of activities coordinated to perform a specific task within a company. These flows, whether simple or complex, are the keystone of organizational efficiency. Continuous process optimization is therefore essential.

Whether you know it or not, your business is full of processes. Not convinced? Take a random activity in your company, such as what you’ve been working on today. Can you break this work down into successive stages, involving one or more people, with the aim of achieving a result? It’s a process.

In this article, we’ll show you why it’s important to carry out this optimization. Then we’ll introduce you to the process improvement method.

Why carry out process optimization?

Optimizing a company’s processes is crucial to staying competitive. It improves productivity, reduces costs and increases customer satisfaction.

More efficiency

With process optimization, you eliminate redundant tasks and save time. This allows you to concentrate on value-added activities. What’s more, it simplifies workflow, making teams more agile and able to respond quickly to change. You work better and faster.

Best quality

Well-run processes reduce errors and improve product and service quality. Improved process quality ensures greater customer satisfaction, with products or services delivered in line with expectations. It can also mean fewer returns and complaints.

High-performance safety

By optimizing processes, you ensure that security measures are integrated into every step, minimizing the risk of errors and security breaches. So, whether you’re looking to reduce physical, legal or any other type of risk, make sure you have sufficiently reliable processes in place.

Better sharing of know-how

Well-described and accessible processes facilitate the transmission of knowledge within the company, considerably reducing the time it takes newcomers to adapt to a new position. Every employee has a better understanding of his or her role and its impact on the organization as a whole.

This fosters a culture of collaboration and continuous learning, where teams are encouraged to share their skills and expertise. In turn, this can lead to continuous innovation and improvement, while strengthening the company’s competitiveness and adaptability.

Examples of process optimization objectives

Process optimization is often perceived as automation… and that’s a very simplistic view!

Automation, as the name suggests, is about making things automatic. An automated process is one that runs entirely digitally, without human intervention.

Automation should not be confused with digitization. There’s a world of difference between a fully manual process and a fully automated one. Automation is only one aspect of process optimization, and a powerful one at that, but it must be used wisely.

How do you easily optimize a 5-step process?

Step 1 – Identify

Before you start optimizing processes, you need to identify the different processes that make up your business. These may be sales processes, recruitment processes, incident management processes… The idea is to map the various processes already at work, even implicitly, in the activity you wish to optimize.

Normally, you should be able to name each one with a sentence containing an action verb, e.g. “Carry out a financial audit” or “Stock the warehouse”. If some of these processes contain sub-processes, don’t hesitate to list them too. For example, the process “Ship an order” may contain the sub-process “Prepare a parcel”.

We also recommend that you model the process at this stage. If you need advice on modeling, we’ve put together a comprehensive guide. You can access it by following this link: Process modeling – Step-by-step guidance and Tools

Step 2 – Assess

Once you’ve drawn up this list of processes, you need to identify those that need to be optimized as a priority, based on the benefits mentioned above. But that’s not enough – you also need to know how to measure up! Yes, because as we’ve seen, while it’s theoretically possible to automate almost everything, doing so would probably be totally counterproductive.

Then it’s time to assess precisely which part of the process, and which degree of process optimization, will bring you the best return on investment. To do this, we recommend carrying out a process audit

Step 3 – Describe

Once you’ve identified the process you want to work on, and the benefits you’ll derive from it, it’s essential to visualize it so you can improve it. In order to visualize your process efficiently, we recommend that you opt for a standard notation. For example, BPMn notation is easy to use and understand.

Start by representing the process as it currently exists. You’ll see that this simple task can reveal many things about your current process performance.

Step 4 – Improve

Now you’re ready for process optimization. Visualize problematic steps or groups of steps and modify the diagram until you achieve a satisfactory result. You can add or remove steps, add or remove human actors, add or remove software tasks, change the nature of steps, etc. If you come across a more complex area of your process, don’t hesitate to “zoom in” by breaking down the stages concerned in greater detail.

Here, it is essential to involve the various players in the process concerned. People who are not actually involved in the process on the ground are rarely able to grasp all its practical subtleties. On the other hand, it can be very useful to bring in people from outside the process with a fresh perspective.

Once you’ve achieved a satisfactory before-and-after result, it’s time to test the new version of your process in the field. Above all, don’t forget to keep this work as documentation, which will make your task easier the next time you decide to work on the process.

(Bonus stage) Digitizing

A high-performance process is not necessarily digital, and vice versa. However, when it is possible to digitalize all or part of a process, the results in terms of performance are often very significant.

Here are some of the ways in which digital technology can be used to optimize processes:

The digital procedure

A digital procedure is in fact a digital guide. Its purpose is to guide the person carrying out a process, indicating the steps to be taken in real time. This digital procedure is also capable of evaluating conditions, in order to guide the user in the right branch of the process according to the events he encounters.

The interactive process

An interactive process goes further than the digital procedure by being able to process data during its execution. For example, it may present a form to users to collect information. Then, it can read or write data in a given company software. This type of process enables data to circulate very efficiently between all stakeholders, be they people or software.

The automated process

The grail, you press a button (or not even a button)… And that’s it! This is, of course, the ultimate stage in process optimization. Hyper-optimization is yours!

However, there are several points to bear in mind when automating a process:

• Cost: Automating a process is expensive, so think return on investment.
• Disempowerment: If your teams have nothing left to do, their work can lose interest and meaning, ultimately affecting their well-being and performance on other tasks.
• Dehumanization: Your customers, teams and partners are not robots! Think about their experience of working with your company.

(Bonus Step 2) Produce a process sheet to continue process optimization

Specific process optimization methods from Lean Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma is a process improvement method based on reducing waste (in the Lean sense), focusing on added value for the customer and reducing defects (in the Six Sigma sense) relating to variations.

Lean Six Sigma is made up of a number of process optimization methods:

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Now you know all about process optimization. Now it’s your turn! See you soon for more content!