Why Business Process Management Systems Are Essential In Your Business.

Can you remember the first time you used a computer? Whether it was in the age of laptops, desktops or an Atari computer system?

Like most things new, you would have had a manual to help you learn how to use your brand new computer! How to turn it on? How to look after it and so forth. That manual equates to a business process management system in your business. A system which manages the documentation of your business processes – an important part of imparting information to new staff, new clients or new contractors on how your business operates.

There are some considerations and questions you can start asking yourself to help you map out areas where documenting your business processes are vital. Dave Jenyns of systemHUB shares some insights with you on core business activities that you can translate into processes and systems in the video below.

This video snippet was taken from systemHUB live – to watch the complete recordings from the workshop. Sign up now for your free systemHUB trial – click here.

Video transcript:

For those who are here today, I want you to start to take some steps to put some of this into place, those first couple of steps. I want you to think about your business. We’ll just spend a few minutes thinking about your business in terms of before, during and after. I want you to see your business as interconnected systems.

So just for now, and a little bit later, we’re going to go into some more detail, but you can find a blank page in your notebook and just think of it like this. I want you to think about all of the traffic that you’re getting through to your business, or how people become aware of your business. Whether that is through SEO, whether it is through video, whether it is through offline marketing, whether it’s through referrals, I don’t care where. Just think of it in terms of how do people become aware of your business?

Then what happens? Once they’re aware of your business, they might go to your website. What happens next? You might have a sale. Do they get a sales call, do they order straight off the website, whatever. What happens next? It maybe goes through the accounts department or maybe it’s automatically processed.

Then what happens? It goes through and we need to think about how it is actually done: project management. After the project management, then you’ve got delivery. Then, after that, how do you get them to repeat and come back?

Take a few moments, think about what is currently going on in your business? Plan it out and this might trigger some things in your mind. You might think, I don’t have any processes and procedures in place for that at the moment. We’ll talk about how to break your business down into certain departments as we go. Some bits are going to jump out at you straight away. You’re going to say, yes, I can see I need to fix this. This is a big hole within my business. The first step to getting this right is becoming aware of the holes that you have and understanding what the flow is, understanding what your core processes are.

In most businesses there are between five to seven core processes. They are things that are part of your way and the way that you do things. Once we start installing some systems, imagine if we find a system that helps with the accounting component. We have a process once a sale is made, an email is sent to Sally up the back.

Way to do things

It says, ok, it’s time for you to now step in. She has an email template that follows, copies that, sends it off to the client. She gets them into our system and sets the project up. She waits until they pay. We have a step by step way that we go through and do that.

You might identify some holes that you’ve got at the moment. If we can install one system, imagine if this system saves them two hours a week, eight hours a month. That ends up being 104 hours in a year. Now that might not sound like much, but it’s the accumulation, That is where the magic happens, once you start to stack systems.

The first couple that you do, you’ll say, you know, I’m not really getting much here. Once you start to implement twenty processes in your business and things start to happen without you, then you’ll say, wow. I can see where this is a bit of a game changer.

The fact is your business is a big collection of systems. If you think about your business, almost like a metaphor of the world, then if we zoom in a little bit, the countries might be the departments. If we zoom in a little bit more, underneath each country, you’ll have a whole lot of systems that make up that department. That’s the way I try to think about it. We’ll talk about some of the other areas later.

If you spend the time to do this, a little bit later I’ll show you how to break up the business more. Then we’ll start to prioritise what that actually looks like and how you should tackle things, then you’ll get a very good result.