Business Process Assessments: The First Step on the Road to Growth

For most business leaders, growth is both an imperative and an opportunity. When you think about what growth looks like for your company, you probably think about expanding your operations, hiring more people, and serving more customers — all of which makes perfect sense. 

Here at Syte, we’ve spent decades working with family-owned manufacturing companies to help transform their businesses and accelerate growth. One thing we’ve learned from our years of experience is that getting to that next level of operations tomorrow starts with knowing how your business operates today. 

In this post, I’d like to explore the importance of business process assessment to the overall path to growth, and how senior leadership can use it to map out that journey while safeguarding investments along the way. 

The Road to Growth Can Be Bumpy

When I talk about business processes, I’m talking about the nuts and bolts of your day-to-day operations: the workflows and technology your team uses to deliver on commitments, and the roles and expertise required throughout the organization to keep things running.

Getting a handle on these aspects of your organization is critical to a successful ERP implementation, and provides senior leadership with the information they need to make informed decisions about growth strategies.

Growth factor 1: Streamlining current business processes

Manual processes and bottlenecks slow things down. This might seem like an obvious statement to make, but the real challenge that we see when working with our manufacturing clients is that they don’t always see just how manual their processes are, and therefore can’t spot the bottlenecks in an end-to-end workflow.

This could simply be a matter of history and “we’ve always done things this way.” Individual groups and team members know their own operational areas very well, but they might not be alert to the upstream or downstream parts of the workflow once they hand-off their piece. As a result, the leadership team often can’t see the forest for the trees — and without even being aware of it, they’re already handicapped when it comes to planning a successful growth strategy. 

More and more, business leaders are recognizing that growth at scale requires streamlined business processes. From a pure efficiency standpoint, this clearly makes a lot of sense. The question is, how do you make sure your business processes are optimized? 

A business process assessment puts you in the driver’s seat here. By taking a detailed look at how your organization is currently operating — the processes and procedures involved, the people and skillsets required — you can start to build an end-to-end view of where you are. And from there, you can make informed decisions about what needs to remain in place, what needs to change, and what can be optimized to improve efficiency. 

Growth factor 2: Putting the right people in the right roles

Sometimes, business growth happens incrementally, without a broader strategy. A company gets more business and starts to hire more people to meet the increased demand. 

The problem is that many of the company’s tried-and-true processes are often manual, and don’t scale. As a result, those new employees end up being slotted into the same old transactional functions to do more heavy lifting, instead of knowledge-based roles that would allow them to innovate within the organization. Unfortunately, this approach only reinforces the status quo, or worse, introduces more lag into business operations. 

The fact is, growth usually does require more people. Today’s business leaders recognize that they need to build capacity to grow revenue, and that doing so may have a negative impact on margins (if only temporary). But it’s also true that making the investment to optimize business processes and the people who drive them is money well spent. 

When we work with our clients to examine their current processes and workflows, we’re also looking at the people and the roles that are in place as part of that operational environment. A business process assessment helps you identify critical roles and responsibilities, and the expertise required to execute successfully. 

Putting the right people in the right roles doesn’t just help your business, it can also improve your bottom line: When you empower your team members as knowledge workers, you’re creating new career paths that incentivize your employees to stick with you, resulting in lower employee turnover.

Growth factor 3: Getting back on track faster and more efficiently

Let’s be honest: The road to growth is never straight and narrow. No matter how detailed the map, there are always unexpected twists and turns, obstacles to get around, and timetables that need constant adjusting. 

I can’t say this enough: When it comes to optimizing your business processes and organizational capacity, you can plan now or pay more later. But you’ll have to make an investment, one way or another.

We’re often called in by our clients to help with an ERP implementation that has gone off the rails and get it “back on track.” More often than not, we find that the team didn’t start with a holistic view of their business processes, so they’ve had to force-fit their solution or change processes and workflows on the fly, until they’re implementation is “run off the road” completely. 

In our experience, mapping out end-to-end workflows and processes after the fact usually takes twice as long as doing it up front. And when you have that understanding before you go into implementation, it’s much easier to make informed decisions when surprises pop up.

Bottom line: Doing a thorough business process assessment up front will save you time and money down the road, and protect the investments you’ve made in your ERP solution and implementation. 

Assessing Your Business Processes Is Investing in Your Company’s Growth

A business process assessment doesn’t just set your organization up for a smooth ERP selection and implementation — it can also set you up to scale your organization in the most efficient way possible. 

Are you planning a growth strategy for your manufacturing business? We’d love to help you set yourself up for success. Schedule a complimentary consultation right here.