Business Process Improvement; Your Questions Answered

27th August 24

When it comes to improving your business processes, everything sounds very straight forward, right? You are making changes within your company to refine and enhance your day-to-day operations. 

But how do you actually go about achieving that goal? And how do you know if your changes will actually make a difference? Our productivity experts are here to answer some of the most common questions.

How can business processes be improved?

As a simplified, step-by-step guide, business processes can be improved by:

• Identifying what is working and what needs reviewing
• Deeper dive analysis of the specific areas that need improvement to highlight shortfalls
• Creating a roadmap outlining how you wish to change a process and how you want to get there
• Rolling out this plan, ensuring you monitor performance regularly
• After a period of time, reviewing the process again to determine success
• If needs be, repeating these steps until the process is fully refined and running smoothly 

What is an example of improvement to a business process?

Let’s take an example from one of our hospitality clients with a busy food preparation environment. 

In any commercial kitchen, layout is key. By reviewing operations in a quick-serve restaurant, our productivity experts identified how the client could improve things by considering the detailed layout of their kitchen workstations. 

As a result, our client was able to prepare each menu item 20% quicker, leading to an increase in their capacity during busy periods.

What are business process improvement techniques?

Businesses evaluate current processes to identify what’s working and what needs adapting to increase productivity and streamline day-to-day operations. 

By applying a structured approach, business process improvement techniques enable you to identify, analyse, refine and execute so you can be confident that future processes will be more efficient.

Six techniques to improve business processes

1. Time and motion study – Measures the time it takes to complete certain tasks, enabling you to optimise colleague numbers and processes
2. Efficiency study – A team-wide study that shows where time is spent. It shows where to trim hours off your processes creating savings and opportunities to reshape how time is spent
3. Role study and Organisational design – Measures how specific job roles spend their time and provides a clear picture of how responsibilities are differentiated
4. Workload labour model – Ensures you budget for the resources at a local level to deliver your sales and salary budgets
5. Movement analysis – Enables you to streamline work environments and processes to eliminate any extra effort
6. Process mapping – Visually represent the required steps to complete a task when redesigning your processes

How ReThink can help improve your business processes

At ReThink Productivity, we offer all of these services and more to help businesses improve their processes. With over 50 years of cumulative experience, we work with brands from various industries and sectors, helping businesses understand more about their processes, and how they can make improvements.

Having typically identified 5% operating cost-saving opportunities, our depth and breadth of experience make us the productivity experts.

Want to find out more about how we can help improve your business processes? Get in touch with our team today.