What Is Business Process Design and How to Get Started
Last update: 12 April 2023 at 03:35 pm
3.00/5A crucial step in business process management, business process design (BPD) is a procedure conducted to create a faster and better-optimized system.
It directs your business needs towards a streamlined process strategically to meet the expectations of you and your clients. In simple words, it creates a workflow from scratch and helps things fall into place.
What is Process Design?
Most people consider process design a building block of any business and can create a set of repeatable steps to help achieve your desired business goals. The more importance and effort you dedicate to this step, then the better your business will perform in the coming days, weeks and years ahead.
This process design, in turn, helps save time and increase productivity on a daily basis. This also helps contribute towards the overall outcome of the business.
The process encourages every individual to perform to their full potential and carry equal weightage. This is what separates a great business from a regular one. Although some business owners contemplate whether or not to create business processes, it’s time to look at some of the benefits it offers.
Benefits of a Business Process Design
Having a well-planned business process design and a strategy is key to designing an efficient and scalable business.
Whether you plan to build your business from scratch or re-engineer an existing business, it’s crucial to evaluate the competition in the market and consider a few other factors along with creating business processes.
- Decide whether you want to automate your business by analyzing the redundancies, the areas of inefficiency, and risk factors.
- To improve the way your business operates, you need to conduct a business process analysis.
- Standardizing certain procedures and setting benchmarks will help achieve consistency in your methods and the results you deliver.
- Slow cycle times can be improved by using effective KPIs and identifying the areas of improvement.
- Repetitive tasks don’t require manual labor and attention and might be automated to direct employees towards a high-value job where they can contribute in more meaningful ways.
Types of Business Process Designs
Operations Process
The main function of the business process map is known as the operational process and is directly related to the fundamental values, vision, and mission of the company. As these are the primary revenue streams for the business, adequate attention must be paid to these processes.
Improving this step by filling necessary gaps and preparing a complete evaluation of these procedures will directly impact and increase the growth of your business.
Managing Processes
This process requires planning, organizing, coordination, and control and is mostly goal-oriented. Creating a new process motivates the employees and teams and thereby helps them achieve their targets.
They direct the business towards a specific path and regulate the everyday tasks to meet the daily target and complete work efficiently and on time.
Supporting Process
This procedure is not directly related to the customer but may help create an atmosphere that catalyzes the new process and facilitates better implementation of the primary operating processes. This is why they’re known as supporting processes and mostly consist of work related to the accounting and human resource departments.
How to Implement Business Process Design?
A business process design is implemented when one is just starting their business venture and needs to establish certain procedures and set a roadmap for the journey.
In practice, most business owners don’t dedicate any actual time to do this and rather decide on things when they encounter them. This is an unorganized approach and can’t be termed as a business process design. Unless you plan it well and the structure is based on analytics and graphs, your success can’t be determined.
With structured processes in place, you’ll be able to achieve:
Structure and Consistency
If you work in a large organization, it’s common to have different employees performing the same function. The work becomes messy, and the results are inconsistent if the employees reach the goals. Defining the right way to do something helps you achieve consistency and ensures the work gets done on time.
Increased Productivity and Higher Output
Designing business processes can make your business efficient as your employees will spend less time figuring out the work and more time executing it. This ensures the focus stays on the job and employees don’t waste productive hours.
Business Process Mapping
The steps employed by a business to complete a certain process or function, such as hiring a worker or shipping out a product to a client, is called business process mapping. Also known as business flow charts or business process diagrams, this helps lay out the entire process graphically and demarcate the who, what, when, where, and how of the steps. Many organizations lay out these steps in the initial phase.
Here is an example of a business process mapping on the hiring of employees.
The purpose of these business processes is to understand the structure in detail, including the people involved, the inputs, and the outputs. It also simplifies the process to improve the results and make it more efficient. This step requires you to dedicate time and attention, and it takes discipline for good results to show over time.
These days, a process map has become an essential step in the business world and helps regulate and standardize procedures. It also makes a business more efficient by meeting the audit requirements and having the edge over the other competitors.
According to experts, business process mapping is said to have originated in the 1920s when an industrial engineer, Gilbreth, introduced a flowchart to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). Later during the 1930s, Allan H. Morgensen used the same tools in his lecture at Work Simplification Conferences to demonstrate making work more productive. This is where a process map helps.
Examples of Business Process Design
Industry: Marketing
Company type: Advertisement agency
Process: Commercial ad creation
Marketing agency processes are sometimes a bit complicated as there is more qualitative output to be delivered. The steps may vary depending on the project and the requirements of the client. The few steps that are followed include:
- Understanding client requirements
- Brainstorming concept for the commercial
- Developing and planning a campaign
- Pitching the concept to the client
- Getting approval
- Making necessary adjustments
- Presenting the deliverables
Industry: Corporate
Company type: Recruitment
Process: Recruiting candidates
If one considers the hiring process of a human resources department, right from posting a job update on an online portal to onboarding the employees and familiarizing them with the workings of your company, there are multiple steps involved.
Although this may vary from company to company and the existing process in place, the basic workflow that needs to be followed includes:
- HR executive posting the job update
- Candidates applying through a job portal website
- HR screens the candidates and cross-references the resume submitted
- The best fits are filtered and carried on to the next step
- The selected candidates are called in once again for an interview or whatever will be the next step of the recruitment
- Salary and policy negotiations take place between the potential employee and the HR executive
- Finally, the candidate receives an offer letter on behalf of the company and needs to send an email saying it is accepted
Problems When Implementing A Business Process
Cross-Functional Issues
When multiple businesses are involved in the same procedure and employ the same processes, discrepancies are bound to occur. If these are not resolved in the first instance, then it may turn into a conflict and cause a hindrance to the workflow of your business eventually.
By designing your business process in a balanced way, you’ll ensure a smooth workflow without conflicts.
Distribution of Work
Another common problem faced by businesses around the globe is the lack of effectiveness in how the work is divided. This slows down the overall process.
Bottlenecks in work arise when multiple tasks burden a person, whereas his colleagues don’t have much to do. This leads to stress and leaves your employees feeling demotivated. This makes it important to design a plan where all stakeholders are given equal importance and responsibilities.
Unavailability
Manual activities require the constant attention of a single person and are dependent on their availability. The process stops when this person is on leave or has other tasks on their priority list. Over time, these problems grow to an extent where they are no longer under your control and may considerably slow down your business process.
With the right tools in hand, taking care of such a situation is easy. Process automation tools come into play here and can help you create and implement processes and procedures efficiently. This helps the business production process run smoothly and ensures time management and growth.
Conclusion
When you start your own business, it’s important to plan it well and analyze the competition. It is also crucial to devise a business process design and dedicate sufficient time to it. As a business owner, you must create, understand and execute this process and procedure irrespective of whether your business is small or large.
This helps you create a visual representation of the idea and map out the procedures to help you determine how feasible they are. Once the design process is in place, you need to implement it well and watch your business grow.
