“Best Practice” Business Process Optimisation (BPO)
Business Process Optimisation (BPO) is part of a methodology called Business Process Management (BPM). This method believes in improving a company through improving its processes. A process is a set of actions performed by a person or a group of people and designed to achieve a final goal (see more: process definition
What’s better? Processing a document digitally or with paper? If both methods take the same amount of time and effort—the answer is neither.
Optimising a business process requires more effort than simply purchasing new software. It requires taking a critical look at an organisation’s operations and minimising the resources required to get things done. This blog post will outline three steps to optimising your organisation’s business processes.
First, let’s establish what kinds of business processes we’ll be discussing:
Every organisation, whether it provides education to students or wine to consumers, relies on repetitive tasks to accomplish its “big picture” goals. Sales Management (APQC 3.0 Market and Sell Products and Services), invoicing (APQC 9.0 Manage Financial Resources) and recruiting (APQC 7.0 Develop and Manage Human Capital) are just a few examples of processes that keep businesses moving. The tasks that fall under each process must be handled attentively and consistently—no matter how menial they may seem.
These processes are imperative to business operations, but in some cases they’re more of an Achilles’ heel than a blueprint for success. Do any of your everyday tasks feel more burdensome than productive?
APQC (American Productivity & Quality Center) is world’s foremost authority in benchmarking, best practices, process and performance improvement, and knowledge management. Decades of expertise in this field have enabled APQC to build a massive and ever-evolving library of Process Classification Frameworks® (PCF). PCFs give organisations across virtually any industry insight into the efficiency of their current processes. This focuses process improvement by shining a light on the most glaring areas needing a revamp
What are the Benefits of benchmarking, best practices, process and performance improvement, and knowledge management?
Process modelling and improvement appears on the surface to be a purely internal initiative. But when organisations look in the mirror and see their business operations, they must do so in the context of the entire marketplace. How are competitors executing their core processes, and where are their workflows more efficient than your own? Where are you already ahead of the curve? These questions have historically been very difficult to answer, but with the APQC, modellers can compare their processes to trusted industry benchmarks.
BSG is proud to partner with APQC to integrate these expertly-built frameworks into the Process Manager, our advanced process modelling tool. The integration allows user to evaluate a vast bank of industry standards directly against their own current state and future state models. Being able to see representative models of competitor’s processes next to your own is often an eye-opening and enlightening experience. Organisations can pinpoint where they’re up to par and where they aren’t, thus appropriately allocating resources to introduce impactful changes. For those who have only recently started on process documentation, these frameworks also provide a great jumping off point and clear goal for their future state models
Combined Approach
By combining a digital strategy and best practice APQC business process you get a rapid understanding of priorities and how to assign responsibilities. See our combined approach using Trello and APQC cross Industry processes
In this example we have combine the 13 APQC Business Process into a Trello cloud based collaborate tool