A business process is a series of repeatable steps taken by a team or company to achieve some sort of business goal: managing deliveries, assembling products, onboarding employees, etc.
The key aspect of a business process is repeatability – a process is not a one-time thing.
Let’s say the process is employee onboarding. To onboard an employee, your organization would have to…
- Prepare & hand out the right paperwork
- Assign them a role in the company
- Prepare all of their tech – access to communication, project management tools, etc.
- Prepare the workstation
- Introduce to their team & colleagues
- etc.
Every step here is structured and repeatable. No matter how many employees you hire, you’d have to go through the exact same steps. If a step is missed, it might lead to a very disoriented employee & an unproductive day. On the bright side, the process is very easy to map out or organize using software, maybe even turn it into a checklist.
The main benefit of business processes is that they streamline your business. You can, for example, tell your manager to go “onboard this new employee,” and maybe get some results. Or, they might forget to have them sign some critical document & end up getting sued within a year. With a structured business process, on the other hand, the manager knows exactly what they have to do step-by-step.
This, in turn, makes your business much more efficient…
- Clearer Responsibilities – Everyone knows what task they’re supposed to be working on. So, you won’t have employees working on the same task, for example, or a task being left undone because no one thought it was their job
- Fewer Errors – Since everyone’s on top of their work, there’s much less room for human error
- Higher Productivity – With the tasks communicated properly around the organization, your employees will end up being more productive, as less time is spent on organizational issues
- Lowered Costs – With the added productivity, employees will have much better “output,” as they spend less time on useless work and more on the tasks that really matter
Business Process Examples
There are countless business process examples all around – it’s something that can be found in every organization. Whether you’re a small startup doing content marketing or a giant corporation manufacturing state-of-the-art smartphones, you’re doing all this through business processes.
Client Onboarding Process
When onboarding new clients, an agency has to display professionalism, courtesy, and expertise. If you end up acquiring a big client, the last thing you want to happen is your team sitting there and wondering, “Ok, so what next?”
If you have a clear, defined client onboarding process, however, that’ll be a thing of the past. For the sake of an example, let’s look at the case with a marketing agency.
- Schedule an initial meeting. Get to know the client’s business, how the industry works, how’s the competition, etc.
- Assess company goals & assets. Know what your client wants from you, and how you can use their strengths to achieve those goals
- Define KPIs. The client will want to have a way to measure your progress, making sure that you’re bringing in results
- Create an action plan. What your team is going to do within the week, month, year, etc.
- Pitch the client. See if they like the proposed strategy. If not, start over. If they do, assign all the tasks to the right team members.
Content Marketing Process
Content marketing can be a very hectic mess unless you organize it into clear business processes. Unless you work on this, you’ll end up having 20 work-in-progress articles lost in limbo, a very confused designer, and a confused follower-base – desperately waiting for their weekly article.
Depending on your strategy, there are a lot of different ways to establish content marketing workflows.
For the sake of an example, let’s go through a very basic publishing process…
- The content writer takes up & finishes the first draft of an article. Includes descriptions of any custom images that are to be used in the article
- The marketer gathers influencer contact information, to be used for advertising and marketing once the article is done
- The editor proof-reads the article, makes points on grammar, style, spelling, etc.
- The designer creates custom images as asked, sending them over to the content writer
- The writer takes the comments into consideration, fixes any mistakes, and adds the images to the article
- The SEO expert makes sure that the article meets the right optimization best-practices & publishes the article
- The marketer uses a combination of advertising & email outreach to make sure that the article is read
Business Process Mapping, Improvement, Re-Engineering & Automation
Business processes are, essentially, the building blocks of any organization.
The thing is, though, that for a lot of businesses, the processes are unorganized and implicit. Everyone has a general idea of what’s going on and what needs to be done, but it’s not on paper or is not tracked through software.
To get most out of your business processes, there are 4 things you could do.
Business Process Mapping
Business Process Mapping is pretty straightforward – you probably have a pretty good idea of how your business works. If you’ve been doing it for a while, then you definitely know the ins and outs of it!
So, you’d want to put down all your processes on paper. You could either use actual paper for this, a flowchart software, or workflow management software. From then on out, you can use the graph to analyze or keep track of your processes.
As a given, the more advanced your tool is, the more benefits you’ll get. Workflow software, for example, in addition to allowing for mapping, also lets you keep track of the process in real time.
Business Process Improvement (BPI)
Once you have all the processes down, you’ll get an even better idea on how your business works. That would eventually lead you to initiate a business process improvement (BPI) campaign – from a top-down view, it’s very easy to spot weaknesses in your processes. Sometimes you’ll find tasks that are completely useless, others, you’ll find more efficient ways to do them.
In some cases, you’ll find that some tasks are completely useless and can be skipped. In others, you might find a much better, faster way to do them.
Business Process Automation (BPA)
One way to improve your business processes is to just put technology into the mix – and that’s where business process automation (BPA) comes in. Any task that is extremely menial – that is, too much manual labor – there’s a chance that software can do it much better and faster.
Say, for example, a team member has to email the person who’s responsible for the next step of a process. Rather than having to manually do it, business process management software (BPMS) could do it for them.
Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR)
In some cases, you’ll realize that your processes are just completely out of date. Rather than take something old and add up on it, it’s going to be much easier to just completely re-do them.
Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR) means taking your old processes and finding new ways to carry them out. This can be with the help of technology, for example. Instead of manually doing accounting in the form of a physical ledger, you could adopt some accounting software that makes the old process completely redundant.
A more recent example is using smart contracts for BPR. DNN, decentralized news network, powers it’s publishing system through smart contracts. The submitted articles need to be reviewed by different readers in order to select the best one and push it to the editors and ultimately to the publishers. Smart contracts can help you move the articles through the publishing pipeline, stage after stage, while reducing biases and increasing efficiency.
Conclusion
Now that you have a good idea of how business processes work, you might want to start mapping them out and possibly carrying out a BPI or BPR initiative.
And the best way to do that is through Workflow Management Software. Map, optimize, and streamline your processes with Tallyfy – simply by adopting software, you’re already taking the first step in making your processes more efficient.
Related Questions
What is meant by business process?
A business process essentially consists of a set of repeated tasks as transforming something from a start state to an end state. I’ve seen so many companies suffer because process was not well defined — not people doing random things solipsistically, but lots of people doing the same thing slightly differently, which results in inconsistency and pain. At its best, a good process is not a list of tasks; it is an organization’s wisdom, captured and distilled. Done well, it doesn’t feel like bureaucratic busywork – it feels like a friendly shovel of sand into the gears that stand between us and our work lives getting saner.
What is a key business process?
Key business process Key business process is a mission-critical workflow that has a direct impact on the bottom line or on the experience of the end customer. Think of them as the difference between “nice to have” and “if these go down, we’re in deep, deep trouble.” For example, client onboarding is an important activity that will influence the relationship from the outset and have long term impacts. When I talk to our customers who have found ways to simplify these important systems, you can hear the relief in their voices — they’ve transformed anxiety-ridden workflows into confidence-building systems and they have more space to focus on what matters.
What are the five business processes?
Rather than memorizing a list of 5 business processes which can be recited parrot-fashion, I like to consider the flow of value through the business. All businesses have activities that: generate value (development, delivery), recover value (sales, billing), sustain value (HR, IT), safeguard value (risk management, quality control) and enhance value (innovation, optimization). What fascinates me is the intersection of these categories — break one of the chains in your support processes and you can go from profit to losses very, very quickly. Which is why it’s so important to take into account a holistic view of your ecosystem of processes.
What is the 5 step business process?
I have noticed the ‘conventional 5-step’ process (Plan, Organise, Execute, Monitor, Optimise) is wonderful in theory… but it lacks one very important material reality check. There is a validation between the planning and the organization. brought something like this order to the process: And between the figuring out of the what and the structuring of the how, there should be this thing called validation — a kind of “does this even make sense?” moment. I’ve seen too many teams go through beautifully executed processes that solve the wrong problem. Here at Tallyfy, we’ve long argued for iterative process design – small experiments which influence how you design processes before you roll it out at scale. This prevents the iterative shiny complex process created that no one actually uses.
Why are business processes important?
These business processes are that important because they can mean the difference to whether you can scale successfully or just wallow in chaos as a business matures and starts to make money. Without well-baked processes, your business is 100% dependent on tribal knowledge and heroics. This is something I’ve seen firsthand — organizations where every customer page is equivalent to reinventing the wheel, where the simplest of tasks must be done with Herculean effort, where new employees are unable to become productive for months. Amazing processes don’t oppress you with rules – they lay the groundwork for the important consistency, improvement, and, yes, more meaningful creativity in the places where it counts.
What makes a business process effective?
The well-tuned process has control and flexibility at the same time. It paves the way, but it never bulldozes.” The most effective processes I’ve witnessed have three traits in common: they are simple enough that people actually use them, are transparent so roadblocks are clear — and can be addressed — early and are nimble enough to change as needs change. And here’s the counterintuitive part: When process that is working is working, it can almost disappear because it’s reducing friction instead of adding friction. You know you’ve built something that’s working when your team stops complaining about “the process” and actually has time to do some real work.
How do you identify business processes?
The Search for Business Processes Finding business processes starts with following the money flow – where the work goes in, how it flows, and what is the result. But avoid the classic sin of projecting only the “happy path.” The real insights come from seeing where things usually go sideways. When I’m working with teams, I often say, “What do you groan about when it lands on your desk?” Nearly always, those pain points reveal something that is broken, or missing, in a process. One more clue: notice the places your team has to resort to workarounds or shadow systems. These are clear signs of process that reads well but doesn’t work in real life — and those are all some of the finest sounding places to aim continuous improvement.
What are the common problems with business processes?
Oh, where to begin? The most insidious of process problems I encounter are the most blatant culprits of dreaded scan-latency… they are the not-so-hidden in plain sight issues. Things such as “That’s how we’ve always done it!” could be costing your company 1,000s of hours a year. Failed silent handoffs where work just disappears into the abyss for weeks at a time. Zombie processes that keep, in their undead way, shuffling along many years after they stopped doing anything useful. And then there are the procedures designed by people who will never have to use them. my personal pet peeve. These are not mere logistical headaches — they are morale killers and they are how good people come around to dusting off their resumes.
How can you improve business processes?
Good process is not about shiny tools — it’s about the right mix of empathy and data. Start by listening to some of the actual humans who deal with these systems on a daily basis. They know exactly what went wrong. That would be lightly to measure what matters — cycle times, error rates, customer effects. I’ve seen companies change the course of their operations — doing so not with some expansive redesign but rather a series of small, evidence-based improvements. The secret sauce? Making process improvement everyone’s job, not a discrete project. By fostering a culture where people are comfortable challenging the way they work and suggesting a better way, continuous improvement is built into the system.
What role does technology play in business processes?
Processes shouldn’t be the bitches of technology; technology should be the great enabler of processes. … I’ve seen too many groups put into fancy systems where they just need to work around the system, rather than actually having technology that serves how they want to work. The best workflow automation software transcends human ability—automates the boring, dusts out black boxes, and systems of systems. But the first time is important to do this the right way. When you automate a broken process, all you get is a broken process that moves more quickly. Technology should support the processes you do best, not dictate how your team operates.
How do you document business processes?
Traditional process documentation falls short because no one actually reads 50-page procedure manuals. Great documentation is visual, accessible, and helpful. I’m also now a staunch believer in what I’ve come to call ‘living documentation’—process maps which are literally whether the source of the actual work is. Keep your documentation fresh and keep it useful by having it directly in the workflow (not stored in some shared drive). Focus on logging the big decision points and crucial information, not every piddling little detail. And remember: The best process document is the one people actually use when they need their questions answered.
How do business processes impact company culture?
Processes scream, culture matters There’s no denying it; it will be your mission statement that shouts from the rooftops what culture you aspire to. What I think is interesting is that processes whisper to the world what an organization really values. Awkward approval processes practically scream “we don’t trust you,” while thoughtful workflows can also signal respect for people’s time and expertise. The healthiest companies I’ve seen with the strongest simplest cultures use process as tools to enable autonomy not a repression system. They created workflows that enable people to do their best work, rather than policing them. Your processes are constantly sending a message about the sort of firm you really are.
What’s the difference between a process and a procedure?
It’s a deeper divide than a lot of folks realize. Process is a narrative of how work gets done, what steps, in what sequence and the result. A process on the other hand is an abstract idea of how to do something, where as a procedure tells you how to do that something in that process. I like to think of processes as motorways and procedures as the direction you are travelling. You wish to have them both, but you wish to have them for different purposes. One mistake I see too often is mixing these two, where organisations adopt rigid procedures where they should have processes, or keep processes woolly when a procedure would have made things clear. And making this difference clear and prioritizing the former is essential if we are to take operations manuals as a tool for directing work where they should be, rather than merely a dust collector.
How do you measure the success of your business process?
A good score is not just how much you got done but how you got it done. Absolutely time and cost matter, but I would advocate for both leading and lagging indicators to be considered. Leading metrics may evaluate process adherence or quality checks, protecting the lagging metrics of business outcomes and customer satisfaction or revenue. The most overlooked metric? Employee experience. If a process is making your team miserable, it will break at some point, no matter how perfect it is. The greatest measures are those that combine the quantitative and qualitative, the data with the stories of the people who have to endure these processes, day in and day out — they will tell you truths the numbers cannot.
What does Tallyfy believe about business processes?
We at Tallyfy think that organisations have the entire order of problems completely back to front. But they spend months crafting intricate flowcharts and documentation that no one reads in practice, as opposed to creating simple, useable workflows to help people actually work. Our whole philosophy is built on the idea that our processes should be living, breathing things which support people and that you go around living, breathing things, you do not jump over or go through bureaucratic blockades. The perfect process, to us, is one that vanishes into the background, each aspect a silent signifier for the work it helps refine. We believe processes shouldn’t just be documented, they should be trackable, improvable, and evolve as your business does.
How do business processes relate to the real world?
We have achieved a great deal of difference with Tallyfy in the way we structure our client onboarding and policy renewals. It enabled us to remove wastefulness and shrink meeting times from hours to minutes, and possibly most important, made it so we could avoid painful penalties by automating critical work. And now, I see exactly where we’d be needing to chase for these updates.”
“Our service delivery time has changed in very many ways on hours and this has affected our staff performance and how many clients we can get to see. Our company can maybe helps make decisions easier.” – Soluciones Eficaces, Director Would Just Like to Say Thank you.
When you pull these real world observations into focus that our customers have made it’s quite apparent that business processes are very real – and are effectively the silent partner behind how companies actually deliver value to their customers, lower stress for their workers and achieve sustainable growth.
Why is process visibility so critical for business success?
Read Hub The unsung hero of operational excellence is process visibility — knowing where the work is at any given time. Without that visibility, leaders make decisions in the dark, and teams are duplicating the same effort, and customers are having these inconsistent experiences. I have no idea how many companies I have seen do a 180, from awful to awesome, just by shining a light on an org that still is not as opaque as it should be. None of that hideous “I thought someone else was doing that?” syndrome and the endless status-updates in the afternoon that just fill your day. Overview and accountability When everyone can see where things stand, responsibility thrives, bottlenecks get exposed, and the team is free to focus on doing, rather than on coordinating.
