Check Your Blind Spot: How Expert Guidance Can Help You Get the Most from Your Business Process Assessment

A solid business process assessment is the cornerstone of effective ERP planning, implementation and improvement efforts. From selection to implementation to optimization, a thorough understanding of your end-to-end business workflows ensures a smooth and successful journey.

While there are many approaches to doing a business process assessment, this is one area where having an expert set of “fresh eyes” can make all the difference in staying on course, or getting off track. 

In this post, I’m going to share three specific advantages to bringing in outside expert help when it comes time to do your business process assessment, and why it’s often better for your business and your people.

1. Fresh Eyes Uncover Blind Spots: Eliminating Gaps Before They Become Costly Problems 

Here at Syte, we’re big believers in doing a business process assessment at the beginning of your ERP journey (we call this the “Discover” phase of our 3-Step framework). When you start where you are — and map it out in detail — you’ll have a much clearer idea of where you want to go and what you need to get there. 

The key is getting the right people and perspectives in the room so that you can build the full picture. 

Obviously, the people who work in your company are the most familiar with the business processes that drive day-to-day operations. In my experience, they usually have expert knowledge in the workflows that apply to their own area of the business. The challenge is that they can also often have a bit of “tunnel vision.” When it comes to other departments or functions, they don’t necessarily have awareness of the downstream or upstream nuances of the end-to-end process. 

ERP solution providers bring a different perspective altogether. They may have a lot of experience in mapping out business processes, but without close familiarity with your business, they can (understandably) default to focusing on what their software is already set up to do. The danger here is that you might end up adapting or force-fitting an existing business process to meet the software’s capability — and that won’t necessarily be what’s best for your organization. 

An outside expert can take a holistic approach — going deep and wide.

An outside expert isn’t attached to existing ways-of-doing-things, nor are they constrained by what a particular ERP solution is able to do. Business process assessment is simply an information-gathering exercise, with a goal of getting the fullest picture possible of what business processes keep the business going day to day.

A thorough business process assessment doesn’t just get you going on the road — it also helps keep you on track. When you have all of your critical business systems and workflows carefully mapped out, you’ll know what to prioritize if you hit any snags during implementation, instead of guessing at the right decision to keep the project moving. 

2. A Cross-Functional Approach Builds Stronger Relationships: The Employee Experience Upside

It turns out that taking a broad cross-functional approach to assessing your business processes has other intangible benefits for the organization — namely, by fostering more collaboration among colleagues and strengthening work relationships.

When you have outside expert help to do a thorough assessment of your business systems and workflows, the process is, by nature, collaborative. That’s because in order to get a holistic end-to-end view of your business processes, you need all the relevant stakeholders involved.

This is where it becomes more than just an exercise in gathering information. A collaborative business process assessment takes team members out of their day-to-day roles and allows them to engage with one another in new ways. They learn from and about each other, and expand their organizational awareness in a concrete way. 

In working with our clients, we’ve found that using this type of cross-functional approach also operates as a kind of team-building exercise. The knowledge sharing and communication lay the foundation of work habits that carry forward into the implementation phase, and eventually help accelerate completion of the project. Employees can support each other effectively through the transition, in part because they established good rapport and reciprocal awareness of each other’s functional requirements during the definition phase. 

I have more to say on this subject in this short video …

3. Engagement Begets More Engagement: Building Organizational Capabilities

When you bring employees to the table to discuss how their business processes impact other areas of the organization, you encourage engagement beyond what they do in their day-to-day work lives. 

This is especially important in heavily regulated industries like manufacturing, where teams often end up working in silos.

A business process assessment led by outside experts can help remove the operational blinders, allowing employees to see where their work and processes fit in the larger picture of company operations. 

In practical terms, we find that this engagement makes the ERP implementation go much smoother. But it has implications beyond a successful project completion. When you invite your employees into these types of conversations, you are empowering them. 

When employees have a chance to learn about (and contribute to) the larger organizational picture, they feel valued and respected. These collaborative initiatives become opportunities for learning and networking; they step out of their typical “Task Worker” role and step into a “Knowledge Worker” role. It opens up avenues for cross-training and professional mobility. 

When you engage your employees in this kind of bigger, cross-functional initiative, you are building organizational capacity. An engaged employee is more likely to stay invested in operational excellence and innovation — and stay with your company for the long haul. 

An Outside Perspective Can Lead to Greater Clarity

A solid business process assessment is critical to a successful ERP implementation, and it’s the last place you want to cut corners. Bringing in an outside expert to help may seem more costly up-front, but it pays for itself in greater savings in time and money down the road. 

Are you looking to learn more about doing a business process assessment for your organization? We’d love to help. You can schedule your complimentary consultation right here.