Situations Warranting Business Process Improvement

Business Process Improvement programs when designed with specific objectives and sponsored and facilitated by the senior management including Business Unit heads yields the desired results.

Organizations use BPI as a tool to raise the bar and take their business operations to another level. BPI as a tool for effecting change management is effective especially when Organizations are very large, have multiple business units, operate across different geographies and markets. BPI is also highly effective in medium and smaller Organizations which can attempt to overhaul the entire Organizational processes by conducting a BPI program.

The objective or the need for BPI program has got to be decided and chosen by the Business Unit heads and the management of the Organization, for they are the ones who know what they need in terms of their business goals and the need for transition can be defined by them. Apart from Organizational objectives to do with the growth and new businesses, there may be many situations in the current business scenario that can be addressed through BPI.

Customer satisfaction happens to be one of the key driving factors for all Organizations and businesses. All business leaders recognize that their business grows and additional revenues accrue through satisfied customer relationships.

Customer satisfaction encompasses not only quality of product or service and pricing but has a lot to do with delivery as well as after sales service and maintenance too. Therefore Organizations tend to give specific focus to improving their internal as well as external processes that are involved in customer servicing. In many cases the Customer service process currently being followed may be very expensive or time consuming.

Especially in case of sales management, after sales servicing, spare parts delivery, customer complaint management, repair and return as well as warranty servicing and other related areas call for continuous improvement in processes to augment the efficiencies as well as to reduce the costs.

Most of the companies have introduced automated system driven processes for customer relationship management and in case of larger businesses, the entire process has been outsourced to BPOs.

In an effort to improve the business processes, Organizations have adapted the practice of outsourcing the supply chain services using external vendors and supply chain partners. Even in case of field support and warranty supports as well as parts return and repair, Organizations are using multiple vendors to cover the entire market across the county of operation.

When multiple players both internal as well as external are involved and multiple functions as well as departments are involved, managing the efficiencies and ensuring seamless co-ordination is possible only by standardizing and operating through business processes.

Periodically Business process improvement would have to be taken up to streamline processes, to look at redundancies and to introduce new technologies that can automate the processes and thus reduce the costs as well as improve the efficiency of service provided through the network.

However before one embarks on a BPI exercise it is essential to determine and quantify the expected impact in terms of impact on Customer, in terms of Business impact as well as in terms of cost and work efficiency impact too.