The ROI of Prioritizing Process Improvement
As businesses grow the effort to improve, streamline or create better processes, without fail, moves to the forefront of the business owner’s objectives. Have you ever heard someone say, “you can die from a thousand paper cuts?” It’s a common phrase with origins related to an ancient Chinese torture mechanism but with modern day roots in today’s business place. While it’s a tongue-in-cheek statement (no one really dies from paper cuts), this attention to process improvement can truly be a bellwether about the success of your business.
The ROI (return on investment) of any business initiative is the natural next direction to turn, and process improvement is no exception. Determining the ROI of process improvement can be complex but it is definitely possible.
Learn more about calculating the ROI on your process improvements:
- Direct Benefits – These are the easiest ways to demo. Direct cost savings related to your process improvements translates into costs that have been reduced or eliminated due to your improvements. For example, maybe you were able to cancel a monthly premium to an online tool that you no longer need or find a way to do something electronic rather than in “hard copy” form, saving money in printing costs.
- Indirect Benefits – Indirect cost benefits are costs that are avoided. These are downstream benefits that result from an upstream process improvement. While these indirect ROIs on process improvement might be harder to measure, it is important to take the holistic view and understand how one change can impact many aspects of your business.
- Intangible Benefits – Intangible benefits can often be the hardest to quantify, but some of the most important results of your process improvements. For example, how can you quantify the ROI that your business gains from a process improvement that improves your company’s culture or enriches your customer’s brand affiliation?
Determining ways to measure process improvement results is a must for every business. Even when the improvement is hard to quantify an estimate can be used to factor in the benefit, you gain from your efforts.
3 Tips On How To Improve Processes From Crown Center Executive Suites:
- Optimize Meetings – Meetings are a critical part of your business, but they can be one of the greatest productivity drains at the same time. A place to improve processes for your company may be to look at your meeting scheduling as well as the format for your meetings. Are too many team members taken off their jobs to meet on a regular basis when not needed? Could a creative office space scenario accomplish a more productive version of the same meeting? Taking an assessment of your organization’s current meeting strategy and effectiveness could do so much to save time, increase productivity and even lift employee morale.
- Increase Access To Information – By making access to key bits of information easily accessible to both employees and customers, you can find improvement in process as well as customer/employee experience. Frequently asked questions, document portals accessible 24/7 via internet or intranet as well as chatbots can all help to eliminate bottlenecks and improve processes.
- Tap Experts To Help – A common conundrum that businesses face is getting their backend systems to communicate with each other, making measuring conversions, streamlining accounting efforts and working efficiently next to impossible. This is an especially common challenge for companies that have an e-commerce based sales funnel. By tapping a technology expert that understands how to get tools like Apple Pay, Venmo and other e-commerce pay portals talking to accounting tools like QuickBooks, you can not only improve processes, but also gain insights to your business’s successes.
Sometimes the key to getting better results for your business is looking at how things are being done to identifying places for improvement. These process improvements could equate to cost savings, improved efficiencies and even improve your employee morale. When office space factors into the success of your business, you’ll find the options you need at Crown Center Executive Suites – where we specialize in office space, meeting rooms and virtual offices. We offer a wide variety of workspace options that can help improve your processes as you scale up or down without worry or hassle, including:
- Economically-priced office spaces
- Day offices
- Shared workspace, virtual offices and dedicated desks
- Meeting rooms
- Training center with state-of-the-art equipment.
Set up your tour of Crown Center Executive Suites today!