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Good process management allows the company’s activities to be more agile, and it is responsible for establishing an efficient communication between the entire team and avoiding losses resulting from failures, errors and bottlenecks. (more…)

When you look at it closely, a company is very much like a living organism. Various departments work together at the same time to ensure that the company as a whole functions well. However, just as a sick organism has difficulty in functioning, a company can also get into trouble when its processes are failing, and a way to solve this problem is optimizing your processes.

Company processes can be understood as a group of activities that are performed with the objective of meeting your firm’s common goal. There are internal processes – production and assembly, for example — and external processes — like sales processes. These processes vary for every business activity.

Some businessmen focus their efforts just on the final results of the company. In a retail store, for example, increasing sales is the main target. However, failure in other activities can lead to losses, even if the desired final results are being achieved.

In practice, optimizing is gaining agility and quality in a performed task. That’s why a businessman should map all of the company’s processes. This is the only way to understand whether a process is efficient or not.

Below is a list of some processes that frequently need to be optimized in organizations. Take a look!

Hiring processes

Hiring someone is an investment. That’s why ensuring that the person you’ve hired is the right one for the job is fundamental, because the cost of hiring is high.

Besides benefits, this process involves work on the part of the HR team, and the time that these employees spend is valuable.

Training an employee who won’t remain in your company and having to begin the hiring process all over again also affects department productivity, leading to delays in project completion.

Communication processes

Communication is a focus in business, but mainly in terms of the consumer. It’s important to remember that failures in internal communication will result in tasks being done in an unsatisfactory manner which harms quality and requires rework – a word that should be avoided in any company.

Thus, you need to verify if the tools you use for internal communication are efficient.

Production processes

Many production processes can be automated, thus diminishing labor costs and improving the quality of the final product. Attention should also be paid to rework, duplicate work, and even problems with the factory layout which can affect the company’s final results.

Sales processes

Customer behavior has changed due to the increasing use of the internet, which is why it’s important for every company to have a digital presence, even if your objective is not to sell on the web. Post-sales customer service can be done through online chats for example.

In some cases, even when you meet your targets, your profit margin doesn’t increase, and this happens because you’re not paying attention to strategic cost management. Technology can help this type of process become more efficient.

Now that you know the importance of process optimization, it’s time to learn what the 5 most common mistakes in business cost management are and how to avoid them! Let’s go?