Process Knowledge = Efficiency

Not understanding your company’s business processes has to be considered a cardinal sin, especially during this economic recession. For the past five years the majority of companies have either downsized their workforce or issued hiring freezes to cope with the economic conditions. Because of this downturn, sales forecasts and revenue expectations at most companies are tempered, however the number of operational improvement and cost saving projects seem to be increasing in an effort to offset the decrease in sales. Essentially, senior management is demanding that Operation’s increase their workload without increasing their workforce. So how does understanding your company’s business processes help solve the problem? 

Historically, the people who cared most about what affect department A’s operations had on department B’s were project managers. The project manager would scope out dependencies and document task sequences. Working with project managers offloaded the need to understand any task that fell outside your immediate circle of responsibility. With good project managers this solution works well. The problem arises when the number of projects is greater than the number of project managers. By having management demand a multitude of cost saving projects you’ve increased the demand for project managers without increasing the supply. It’s important to note that a project manager, as described above, isn’t necessarily an employee assigned that job title but instead the person who spearheads the project.

With limited or no project management help it now becomes imperative for employees to understand, at least at a high level, your business process flow. That’s not to say they need to fill the role of a project manager but what it does mean is they need to understand how they get their inputs and who uses their outputs. These inputs and outputs are not only physical, but include things like accounting information, database code, shipping terms, and lead times. As employees begin to understand these processes and how their job affects those downstream, a host of benefits arise. These benefits might include; cross department collaboration, decrease in project implementation time, improved time management and multitasking, and increased visibility and awareness. 

Take, for example, a buyer who’s been told he needs to reduce the costs of submitting RFP’s to suppliers. This buyer might turn to IT for web option to facilitate this process decreasing emails and phone calls effectively reducing the cost of submitting the RFP. If the buyer understands the IT development process, he’ll know upfront the inputs he’ll need to provide include; business requirement documents, supplier data to be used in development, security requirements, and webpage design ideas. If the buyer understands the process he’ll also know that somewhere in the middle of the project IT is going to provide a beta version of the solution as an output that he’ll need to critique, test, evaluate and summarize as an input back to IT so they can finish the process.

By knowing the process the buyer reduces development time, he understands he can work on other projects until IT has the beta version ready, and he knows when that version is ready he needs to allocate some of his time to testing. Essentially, because he knows the process he becomes more efficient. That efficiency is the key to weathering the storm during this recession. With more efficient employees; your reliance on project management greatly decreases, it’s easier to accept the workload that comes with cost savings projects, and hiring freezes don’t hurt as much. In the end, you see why not understanding your company’s business processes has to be considered a cardinal sin, especially during this economic recession… because it severely limits your overall efficiency.