Systematizing Small Businesses & Mistakes And Errors In Business.

Most mistakes and errors in business are the end result of not having clearly defined procedures for common tasks and not a result of poor materials or disgruntled employees. Here are a few ways to create procedures and systems that will make your business more successful.

• With the haphazard process management common in many businesses, it is little wonder that employees struggle to do a good job.
• Process clarity is one of the three key foci in effective organizational design, along with people and technology.
• Where process and role clarity is lacking, personal idiosyncrasies and political manoeuvring take over.

• How a customer complaint is handled, an invoice is processed or an engineering drawing is approved in many organizations does not depend as much on sound business reasoning than it does on who does it and what day of the week it was done on.
• Research indicates that 80% or more of product defects and service problems are due to systemic deficiencies with processes.
• Less than 20% of problems are due to non-random factors, such as malicious employees, poor raw materials and machine breakdown.
• Although mapping your business processes involves no costly capital expenditure and is relatively simple to do, it pays huge dividends in employee commitment business efficiency.

Key Pointers

Both large and small organizations communicate fragments of important policies and processes including a new data entry procedure or new purchase authorization policy to employees through one-time emails and other similar modes of communication. Expecting employees to forage through past emails and other transitory documents leads to wasted time and exasperation. Here are some better ways to keep the employees involved:

• Employees who do the actual work are most familiar with the common roadblocks and bottlenecks and the key contacts in the organization to get things done.
• They are also in the best position to understand the detailed steps in each process.
• Keep managers and supervisors out of the process-mapping sessions turns out to be beneficial as they have a tendency to dominate the sessions with their own “expertise.”
• Involving the employees by inviting them upfront to join process-mapping teams makes the employees feel important and keeps them motivated.

Process Objective

• The employees must be aware of why each process is performed and what are the expected results of each process.
• This is where work starts to take on new meaning for employees.
• Knowing about the process gives employees a sense of purpose in their working life.
• This help to focus attention on removing non-value add activities.
• Asking the teams to identify the inputs to the process and the expected outputs will serve to clarify what the process needs before it can begin and what customers of the next process will get before they can begin.

Process Activities

• It is important to clearly identify the start and end of each process.
• Extra activities will quickly creep into the picture until the process becomes unmanageable, if the team neglects this important step at the start of each mapping session.
• To begin with, think of one activity that triggers the process. Then think of the last activity performed.

• Identify a process owner for each process.
• This is one person who is responsible for ensuring process efficiency from beginning to end.
• All major processes flow through departments and it is critical to have a process owner who has sufficient authority and credibility to make decisions spanning these departments.
• There is no more effective way to quickly dismantle walls that get built between departments and separate them.

For individual firms within an industry, the external business environment also includes their competitors, who may introduce new, superior methods of production, change the ways in which they compete for business, extend their target markets and find new ways of attracting key employees. Your company website is your home base and all of your internet endeavours run to and from it, even hiring the best talent. As a starting point, you can contact an online media consultant to help set-up the website per your requirement. Selecting a domain and figuring out a quality hosting plan to get off the ground, the design and layout of your site, all of these can be taken care of by HyperEffects. Contact us today for our free one hour session especially designed to help small business owners.