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You’ve been in business for quite some time, but your business keeps taking a nosedive no matter how hard you try. Even after expanding your team, you still haven’t become profitable. Everything still looks complicated, and running your own business feels like a tiring exercise.
Situations like this are frustrating and could send any business to a premature end. The problem, in most cases, isn’t about employee incompetence or lack of resources. It has more to do with the absence of an efficient business process. There’s a chance you’re not documenting your processes at all, or you’re doing it manually.
However, the good news is that process management, if done correctly, will help you eliminate the bottlenecks in your business by simplifying how you work. Process management provides organizations with structured processes, control, and direction. It standardizes workflow, creates an exact management sequence, and offers various utilities across multiple business sectors, amongst other benefits.
Additionally, process management ensures workflow is done at the best possible time and in the most efficient way.
When Should Organizations Implement Process Management?
Process management allows organizations to improve human effectiveness and system efficiency by coordinating all their activities seamlessly. Process management fits perfectly into any stage of your business operation.
So, whether your business is in its early stage and you want to get started on a high note or need to restructure its practices from the very core, implementing process management will turn out to be one of your best business decisions.
Furthermore, process management is ideal for every form of establishment, irrespective of the scale of operations. So, nothing stops you from taking full advantage of the vast opportunities that process management presents.
But how can you implement process management in your business to create predictable success and eliminate operational mistakes?
This article will teach you everything you need to know about process management, and why you need it to stay on top of your game. We’ve broken it down into the sections below.
Process management (also known as business process management or BPM) is an organizational discipline that helps companies optimize their business processes. The constant refining and adjustment of company processes for better value and increased profitability is the heart of process management.
In professional terms, process management is the scoping, mapping, coordination, and integration of interdependent business processes to align with organizational goals.
Process management standardizes business processes within an organization. It creates a unique way of executing tasks and activities to achieve transparency and improved efficiency.
What is the Purpose of Process Management?
The purpose of process management is to streamline organizational practices and cultures in organizations and improve their overall performance. In addition, it works to strengthen collaboration between the various teams and parties charged with different tasks in the organization.
Process management works in four steps:
Aggregates existing business resources.
Optimizes the resources for speed, synergy, performance, and cost-effectiveness without compromising on quality.
Makes sure that all processes are consistent with organizational goals and values.
Fine-tunes the processes with newer technologies for better results while keeping to modern best practices.
What Process Management is Not
When people hear about process management for the first time, they tend to look at it from the software point of view. However, process management is much more than that.
Process management is not just a piece of software but a set of workflows that enable an organization to achieve its full potential. It is a fusion of people, models, strategies, and technology, and even though software (technology) plays an important role, it is not the only thing needed to implement process management.
In essence, process management makes sure that humans, ideas, machines, and every other aspect of the business work in seamless collaboration. Also, process management is a hierarchical and universal specialty. While you can apply many process management principles to smaller units or areas of an organization, this is not considered process management.
In addition, many people often confuse process management with other similar concepts. For example, while process management may share similarities with task management at face value, they aren’t the same.
Task management focuses on single tasks, but process management is more focused on the processes that are predictable and form a repetitive pattern.
Let’s look at a few comparisons.
Process Management vs. Business Process Automation
Process management represents the broader strategies that apply to visualizing an organization’s workflows and how to achieve greater efficiency.
On the other hand, business process automation focuses on using technological systems to complement or replace manual efforts. It digitalizes the organizational structure and mechanizes manual chores.
Historically, businesses and organizations have always sought newer methods to reduce operating costs, especially labor-related expenses. With numerous technological advancements, process automation has been the go-to solution for many, as it identifies repetitive and labor-intensive workflows that are time-consuming.
Process Management vs. Workflow Management
Even though both process and workflow management handle similar business needs, they do differently. Process management looks at an entire organization and processes that they can improve. It is about continued improvement rather than mere automation of business processes.
In comparison, workflow management simplifies the steps required to execute a particular task or process to make it less complicated and more efficient.
For instance, optimizing human and mechanical resources for efficiency in a food-processing company is business process management, while improving procurement and meticulous quality control is workflow management.
Process Management vs. Project Management
The end goals for both process and project management are to increase efficiency profitability and achieve set goals. However, both concepts have different applications.
Process management is not a one-off process. It is a continual process that ensures consistency and improved efficiency. It looks at areas that need improvement and suggests organizational changes that businesses can make to that effect. Project management is time-bound, and you would expect a definite result at the end.
Process management is distinct from project management in four (4) areas:
Process Management
Project Management
Repetition
Process management focuses on improving the day-to-day administration of an organization.
Project management focuses on the administration of a single assignment, not repetitive tasks.
Automation
You can automate processes. That is, process management often involves the administration of automated tasks.
It’s not possible to automate projects. A project manager’s job is to oversee a project from start to finish, even if some of the project’s operations require automation.
Perpetualness
A process can be indefinite. Therefore, managing the process continues without a predetermined end date.
A project is limited in time. Thus, once a project reaches completion, it ends there.
Usage
Process management is typically built for companies and organizations.
Project management is built for teams to achieve a specific organizational goal.
What is the Difference Between a Process Management System and Process Management?
As reiterated many times, process management is the efficient management of the various units that make up an organization.
On the other hand, a process management system (PMS) is a component of process management that allows you to efficiently plan and scrutinize the performance and activities of the various units within the organization. In addition, a PMS can include workflow automation software that connects different departments in the organization. Therefore, it makes it easier to plan, organize and map out strategies to accomplish business goals.
A process management system can be a collection of technologies used to build software systems or applications that companies will use to automate various processes. With the process management system in place, process management is automated, and it becomes more efficient and effective at achieving results.
Chapter 2: What Are the Benefits of Implementing Process Management?
Process management helps an organization plan its processes more efficiently and optimize processes excellently.
Here are some sterling advantages of process management and what your organization can benefit from implementing it.
1. Improved business agility
Businesses that implement process management become more agile within a short period. As a result, they react faster to changes in the market and adapt to meet the changing needs of their customers.
Organizations with solid process management in place have greater control and flexibility since it allows for modification of workflows and subsequent re-utilization, which enables prompt adaptation to the changing business needs. Furthermore, when you have process management in place, you can easily acclimatize to sudden movements in the business environment.
2. Reduced costs and higher revenues
Organizations can also reduce their operational costs while increasing their revenue when they have better business processes. Process management always identifies areas that need improvement and optimization. As a result, the organization can get better and cut down on many of its costs.
Process management checks for lapses like redundancy, underutilization of resources, slow processes, and a host of others. All of this is necessary to ensure that resources and the workforce are never idle or unused. With these steps, operational costs will reduce, leading to higher profitability. Also, full utilization of resources, eliminating redundancy, and automating recurring processes will lead to increased turnovers and higher revenues.
3. Higher efficiency
Many organizations have reported increased efficiency as a result of business process management. These improvements help to reduce repetitive tasks and ensure that various individuals benefit from the optimization process.
Process management creates a seamless interlink among the many components of a company to achieve higher efficiency in business operation. This synergy (though subtle) increases the efficiency of each unit and the entire company as well. In addition, once a process management system is in place, the centralized management of the end-to-end business processes reduces friction, increasing capacity utilization.
4. Better visibility
A business will gain better visibility of its internal processes when it has an efficient system to manage its business processes. In addition, a business can also boost its overall perception by making its processes more efficient.
For example, automating processes gives room for the commitment of resources to brand management. This can come in the form of sponsorships, corporate social responsibilities, community partnerships, and a host of others. All of these add up for better visibility.
5. Compliance, safety, and security
With the availability of a well-organized system, process management ensures that members of an organization adhere to all set regulations, thus improving safety, security, and compliance.
The chances of a compromised process sequence are remotely small as employees adhere to a strict process regimen at all times. With such a system, errors are easily traceable and corrected. Also, in the event of an emergency, casualties can be minimized or completely avoided.
6. Enhanced employee and customer experience
With process management increasing workforce efficiency and productivity, there is the supplementary advantage of employee welfare improvement. Process management equips employees to work efficiently as a result of improvements in their work processes.
These improvements are also known to grow morale in the employees and help them deliver an improved customer experience, leading to an improved retention rate and overall satisfaction.
7. More scalable processes
One of the merits of using process management is its ability to scale existing business processes. A process management system can seamlessly create flexible processes and workflow automation that can be replicated within a larger organization in the same geographical enclave or globally without losing its effectiveness.
Process management tools can create scalable processes and organized workflows for improved team collaboration. Additionally, they create well-defined roles that eliminate confusion, process consistency, and process automation which can be a basis for innovation.
8. Greater transparency
A good process management tool ensures systemic coordination of business processes and enhances transparency. With process management at the core of a business, employees can spot and address areas where the organization is lagging because there’s room for individual and collective assessment of the entire process.
This level of openness often leads to better transparency of all the processes and activities within the business, which in turn boosts efficiency and productivity.
9. Less dependency on development teams
Process management gives room for autonomy and growth. There will be little or no need for development teams and projects with a unified management system since they can cater to their basic needs.
This means that newer branches of the company can enjoy a flexible onboarding process. In addition, the organization-wide process can also be duplicated across every department and sector, thus reducing the inputs of development teams, for the most part.
10. Promotes a culture of continuous improvement
Process management continuously probes for ways to improve business efficiency. With this management system in place, you can repeatedly tweak your strategies to achieve the best possible results, thus infusing a culture of continuous improvement into the entire organization.
Chapter 3: Types of Process Management
Process management systems are often categorized based on the purpose they serve. There are many different kinds of business processes, but three of them are the most used. These systems can help you zero in on exactly what your company or a specific process requires to be successful and efficient.
Let’s look at each one individually.
1. Integration-centric process management
Also referred to as system-centric process management, integration-centric process management superintends over processes between existing systems without much human interaction. It is centered around creating processes that move fast. Consequently, they are reliant on application programming interfaces (APIs) and data integration networking mechanisms. Common examples are human resource management (HRM) and customer relationship management (CRM).
2. Human-centric process management
As the name implies, this type of process management handles processes that heavily require human involvement. Even though automation provides a good complement, human-centric process management relies more on individual efforts. The features here often include crisp user interfaces and prompt notifications that allow teams to assign tasks to different roles, making it easier to track individual team members along the process. Examples include data and reports review, and proposal creation, among others.
3. Document-centric process management
This process management solution centers around the processes of a specific business document, such as a contract or a proposal. When a company purchases a product or a service, it goes through vetting, formatting, routing, and a series of approvals as tasks pass through the workflow. This enables inputs and also develops an agreement among stakeholders. Scanning, e-signatures, report compilations, among others, are good examples of document-centric process management.
Chapter 4: Steps of a Process Management Lifecycle
A process management cycle typically begins by laying out the processes involved in the business workflow, followed by mapping areas of improvement and assessment metrics. The entire system is then structured to meet company objectives. Below are the five steps that make up the process management lifecycle.
Image Credit: TechTarget
1. Design
At this design stage of the life cycle, the main objective is to understand the business rules better and ensure that the outcomes align with the organization’s objectives.
Start by analyzing the existing process to see what you can improve, the performance metrics to adopt, and the data collection approach. Next, outline the milestones you want to achieve, break the procedure into multiple tasks, and assign individual tasks for each workflow step.
2. Model
A model is a visual representation of a process. It helps you picture how the business process would operate in different situations. During the model stage, the team should create a visual representation that reflects essential details like timeline, task description, and any data flow within the business process. Doing this gives you a clear picture of the current state of the business as well as the ideal state toward which it is striving.
3. Execute
The execution stage is where you implement the processes you’ve identified and designed previously. This stage is where the process management system is activated. Sometimes, execution may not be wholly implemented at a stretch, meaning that a pilot stage could be necessary. You can then resolve sundry challenges before the full launch.
This stage of the cycle may require technological upgrades, shifts in work patterns, and additional training, to mention a few. However, before launching, it is crucial to incorporate any feedback to minimize errors.
4. Monitor
Monitoring allows you to track improvements and identify any potential problems. At this stage, teams need to keep an eye on the workflow and eliminate obstructions in the process. Additionally, teams can appraise the process to measure workflow efficiency and ensure it aligns with the set-out goals. Of course, it also provides an inkling about whether investing in the process is worth the money or not.
5. Optimize
The final step in the five-part business lifecycle is the perpetual modification of the business process for continuous improvement. At this stage, you want to use the information you’ve gathered in the monitoring phase to finalize your adjustments to the process and improve the overall user experience.
Sometimes though, there may be a need for process re-engineering, a situation where you create an entirely new process because a large part of the system feels out of place. That’s not something to worry about, as it may be what you need to steer operations toward optimum process improvement.
Chapter 5: Process Management Use Cases
Thanks to process management, organizations can use advanced case management tactics to break down a wide range of complex procedures to achieve their desired outcomes. Explore these ten use cases to learn how process management can benefit your business.
1. Human resource
The hiring process in most organizations is long and involves a lot of paperwork. Excessive filing of paperwork is frustrating for candidates and could discourage them from applying to your organization in the future, making you lose the best talents in the process.
Applying process management to HR departments eliminates paper forms and saves time and cost. Additionally, it ends the manual way of collecting personal information, setting up payroll, and assigning office equipment. Also, the approval of employee timesheets is faster, and hiring new employees becomes less rigorous.
Using process management software to automate costly and time-consuming routine tasks guarantees data integrity. As a result, information reaches team members quickly, and employees can make well-informed and timely decisions.
2. Sales
In most companies and organizations, the sales department spends a lot of time coordinating and waiting for the accounting department to approve sales invoices. Unfortunately, the wait time may create customer dissatisfaction, which may stop the sales from happening. Also, the back and forth between the two departments could expose them to silly errors.
However, having a process management tool will eliminate the probability of manual error occurrences. It will also cut the wrangling between the teams, making their tasks more coordinated and efficient.
3. Finance
Normally the finance team gets lots of emails and piles of paperwork every day. That’s because their department is usually responsible for documenting every transaction in the organization.
For instance, departments that want to purchase or replace some equipment must send a quotation to the finance team for approval. Hence, processing all these emails and forms is a hectic exercise and may negatively impact productivity if not automated.
With a process management system in place, it is easier to manage all these tasks. That’s because process management systems offer customized workflows for unique scenarios, allowing approvals to go through with a single click. As a result, your employees will experience less work-induced stress and become more productive in return.
4. Banking
In most cases, banks have to verify customer data before approving their transaction manually. This process involves a lot of desk work and is often frustrating for customers. However, with the implementation of process management in banks, the account opening approvals take fewer minutes to complete. As a result, banks will experience increased customer satisfaction, attract more applicants, and incur minimal operational costs.
Even with the loan application process that looks a bit complicated, using process management can help the banks make better decisions and improve the loan process. For example, a complicated situation like deciding the eligibility criteria for granting personal loans to customers becomes much more simplified.
5. Order fulfillment
An order fulfillment process needs to follow clearly defined steps to ensure correctness and timeliness. Manually running your order fulfillment processes is prone to mistakes, causing order issues and customer dissatisfaction.
With process management software, staff can monitor steps involved in the order fulfillment process in real-time. This way, those in charge of the orders can follow through with them without missing anything. As a result, the e-commerce fulfillment processes will run smoothly, helping customers receive the exact item they ordered and receive those items on time.
6. Content distribution
Content creation and distribution form a significant part of what media houses and marketing firms do. Therefore to improve their internal process, they need a process management system that interacts with content management, work order system, and content traffic, which form the core of their operations.
Interestingly, a single process management software can serve as a web content management system, a portal site front-end, and an integration point for third-party systems. As a result, they have a more efficient system that enhances their content distribution processes.
7. Customer services
Process management software can help you automate customer-centric processes such as order management, service scheduling, and invoicing. A good example of automated customer service is using chatbots to onboard new customers or answer common questions.
When you automate your systems this way, your response time will automatically improve, customer interaction improves, and you gain more visibility. The result is often always predictable—it means more customer satisfaction and a high retention rate.
8. Healthcare management
The advantages of using a process management solution in the healthcare industry are quite numerous. Process management helps healthcare providers to improve case management for each patient to reduce unnecessary delays and inconveniences. It allows healthcare providers to cut down excess time spent planning medical procedures and issuing directives to medical staff. Furthermore, process management software ensures accuracy by removing conflicting information or instructions along the path to ensure quality healthcare delivery.
Lastly, it helps to know that whatever apparatus you set up to smoothen the service delivery process is essential to improve general wellness and save lives.
9. Manufacturing
Products pass through numerous processes during the manufacturing stage, and there are many moving parts to complete the processes. For the most part, these processes are repetitive and require automation to function seamlessly. That’s why process management is inevitable for manufacturers.
Process management software breaks down the methodology used to determine the required product component, the number of components at every production stage, and the tasks required to manufacture the desired number of products. The process management software also automates manual tasks to improve operational accuracy and consistency.
10. Marketing
Creating marketing campaigns is a huge task for digital marketers. Things can get muddled up while creating promotional strategies for brand services or products, setting a budget, creating a marketing budget, identifying the target audience, and determining the appropriate promotional channels. Therefore, simplifying the process seems like the best route to achieving your goals. This is where process management comes in.
Process management for a marketing company will break down the byte-size tasks involved in each campaign stage in a logical sequence. This puts marketers in a position to create the most suitable strategy for their clients. Also, the software can leverage data from prior campaigns to help future clients make better decisions, thus increasing their efficiency in the process.
Chapter 6: Best Process Management Software and Tools on the Market
Even though process management requires the concerted efforts of individuals within an organization to optimize the process and produce desired outcomes, a large part of the implementation depends on software. As a result, investing in the appropriate software is the best option.
What is Process Management Software?
Process management software is a tool for automating processes. It assists you in mapping out your daily processes to identify and eliminate hurdles, limit expenses, make day-to-day operations as seamless as possible, and improve the productivity of the individuals involved in your business processes.
The process management software allows companies to define how to work in a re-usable, generic way. In addition, the software enables employees to collaborate using ready-made information rather than constantly generating it from scratch.
The Most Popular Process Management Tools on the Market
There are many process management tools with distinct features and each performing a wide range of functions. However, it is instructive to note that while some of them share some similarities in the way they function, they also have many other points of divergence.
Make sure you do your diligence by looking for the specific features you want from a particular process management tool before investing in any of them.
We’ve outlined some of the most popular process management tools you’ll find on the market. Hopefully, you’ll discover a few tools appropriate for specific use cases.
1. SweetProcess
SweetProcess is a process management tool for onboarding your employees and documenting your business procedures, processes and policies. Furthermore, it helps you document repetitive tasks that consume your precious time and gives you the systemization to scale and grow your business. SweetProcess stands out for its clean interface, simplicity of usage, and ability to seamlessly integrate with other software for a greater user experience.
To manage your processes with SweetProcess, check this page.
2. Monday
Monday is a great process management tool that helps your business develop workflow automation without any previous experience. It is great for automating your workflow and streamlining the most tedious processes such as lead qualification, drip-email campaigns, and order management. You can also set up an automation to do most of these tasks, so you don’t need to spend time doing them yourself.
To document your business processes on Monday, sign up here.
3. Bizagi
Bizagi is one of the most popular process management tools on the market. It has an excellent analytics feature that uses intelligent algorithms to give real-time insight into your business processes. Bizagi can be integrated with Microsoft Office or used as a stand-alone process management tool. It also has some great workflow examples for different businesses, including retail, healthcare, and legal industries.
To sign up with Bizagi, follow the instructions on this page.
4. Creatio
Creatio helps employees to collaborate seamlessly, allowing them to work on one document simultaneously. It allows users to receive notifications when another user makes changes to the document or sends them a message. The software also enables users to take their projects offline and find reliable business partners to complete the project. That’s why it’s a great option for small and medium-sized businesses.
Quixy is a cloud-based tool that allows business users to design simple processes without coding. Quixy’s process flow editor lets business users sketch out and automate their workflow without learning how to write a single line of code. Business users can set up automated workflows and track the status of cases and projects, all without the need for IT.
To learn how to use Quixy’s no-code process management software, go here.
6. Nintex
Nintex Platform is a cloud-based process automation platform that helps businesses automate their business processes. The software solutions include workflow orchestration, file sharing, cross-enterprise integrations, data management, and web forms. It also offers real-time reporting and analytics so that you can keep track of metrics across all of your workflows in one location.
Process Bliss provides clients with cutting-edge solutions that can be installed and customized “out of the box,” helping them put their business in top form. All of Process Bliss’s tools on the market allow for full integration with popular CRM solutions. In addition, clients can integrate their web-based tools into custom portals that help improve end-to-end business processes.
Try Process Bliss’s web-based process management tool via this page.
8. Wrike
Wrike is a full-scale collaborative work management solution with everything you need to plan and prioritize work and enhance your collaboration. This tool helps you create seamless workflows for every process by standardizing your intake, centralizing all tools, and tracking every important detail. It also provides features for sharing knowledge, managing tasks and time, and reporting results with dynamic dashboards.
Check out Wrike’s process management solution here.
9. Kissflow
Kissflow is a great and easy-to-use tool for creating process maps and managing the operational routines of an organization. It offers many templates that you can customize and share with other employees, managers, or customers. Kissflow has a user-friendly interface, allowing you to create different kinds of diagrams, and its layout is clean and easy on the eyes.
To create and manage your business processes using Kissflow, go here.
10. Zoho Creator
Zoho Creator lets you automate time-consuming and error-prone manual tasks with customizable process management solutions. It is a low-code platform that enables businesses all over the world to create customized processes tailored to their specific needs. You can automate almost any task with Zoho, coordinating your tasks from a single point and ensuring that everything runs smoothly.
What Are the Features to Look for in Process Management Software?
Expectedly, every customer wants good value for their money. Therefore, when deciding on which process management tool to procure, you must select one that is efficient, scalable, and adaptable to your organizational needs. Here is a good number of features to put into consideration:
1. Agile process creation: A good process management tool should be able to duplicate processes easily and deploy them instantly. A good example is the “make a copy” feature of Google Docs which enables duplication of documents in a jiffy.
2. Rule capabilities: Rules and regulations are essential in the day-to-day running of a company. Process management tools accommodate the creation and modification of rules, especially regularly updated ones, such as safety rules.
3. Scalable solution: Every business aims to grow and expand. Your process management tool should allow room for scalability. It should be versatile enough for additional features that are inevitable when an enterprise grows. It should also be transferable and allow remote networking.
4. Workflow automation: This feature is the locus point of process management. It enables auto designation of tasks, roles, workplace regulations, and time management.
5. Dynamic approval: Every organization has a hierarchical structure with distinct clearance levels. Process management tools accommodate the need for evaluations and approvals along the command chain and help you eliminate any form of delay.
6. Electronic forms: In this age of digitalization, emails, e-forms, and their likes have transformed the document processing system for faster correspondence. Your process management tool should have that feature too.
7. Business activity monitoring and dashboards: Earlier, we discussed monitoring as a step in the process management lifecycle. That’s another focal feature every process management tool should have. It shows you what’s happening in real-time and helps you foresee any errors before they become fatal.
8. Automated notifications: Notifications inform the team about progress from every department. It is useful for reminders and dissemination of urgent messages.
9. Visual process diagramming tool: This includes tables, diagrams, and charts. An effective process management tool should give you a pictorial analysis of workflows and the system as a whole.
10. Role-based access control: Different units of an organization have distinct roles. Staff should only be able to access information that is peculiar to them. On the other hand, there is some top-level information that should be available to administrators only. Your process management tool should address this. For example, the Facebook business suite has access levels such as Administrator and Employee for the numerous levels in a company.
11. Mobile support: Mobile devices have gradually become a crucial part of our existence. Every day, we complete crucial tasks on the go via our mobile apps without stepping into the office. Therefore, integrating the mobile support function into process management is a big plus.
12. Single sign-on (SSO): Single sign-on is a user-authentication method that allows users to access multiple platforms with just one set of credentials. The SSO prevents unauthorized access by people who are not associated with the system.
13. Integration with existing software systems: Choosing a process management tool that integrates easily with popular applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, and databases makes life easier. It improves the user experience, thus saving time and energy.
14. Reports and analytics: Reports and analytics provide insights about an organization’s current state based on available data, allowing you to optimize your business and make new plans.
15. Performance for large user bases: Some process management tools could be ideal for small to medium scale businesses but not support large user bases such as multinationals. Therefore, it’s critical to pick a tool that can handle your current scale as well as future growth.
16. Process performance metrics: process management tools with artificial intelligence will effectively analyze data and give you recommendations on the areas of your business process that need improvement.
Chapter 7: How to Super-Charge Your Company’s Process Management Using SweetProcess
As an organization grows, so does the complexity of its business processes. Thankfully, you don’t have to worry about any of the nerve-racking circumstances surrounding a complicated business process.
Why? Because SweetProcess has all you need to effectively manage your processes.
A host of organizations have relied on the brilliance of SweetProcess’s process management feature to grow their businesses. For example, Turkstra Lumber, a company that provides building-related services and products, raised their employees’ productivity by creating seamless business processes using SweetProcess.
Turkstra Lumber
Before discovering SweetProcess, the company had been successful even though they executed a large part of their job without properly documented processes. However, as the team expanded, they soon realized that they weren’t as coordinated as they should be. They carried out tasks in a variety of ways, resulting in inconsistency throughout the organization.
They soon got tired of running their entire processes on Excel Sheets and decided it was time to move to something better and more robust. That smart decision led them to discover SweetProcess.
According to Jamie Ramsden, a top executive at Turkstra Lumber, SweetProcess has been a game-changer for their organization. It offers a more visual approach that gives users a clear picture of what they’re doing.
Within a short period of using SweetProcess, they saw drastic changes in how they documented their processes. They also created a centralized knowledge base that allowed their employees to access all work-related information and prevent avoidable mistakes easily. Thus, the team collaboration became more intense, improving employees’ overall efficiency in the process.
Atlantic Sapphire also struggled with an ineffective workflow system until they found SweetProcess. The Denmark-based salmon farming company resolved to produce the fish locally when faced with massive carbon emissions when flying their product out to customers.
Image Credit: Atlantic Sapphire
That move required their employees to maintain strict adherence to operational procedures. Unfortunately, there was none. So Stanley Kolosovskiy, the company’s technology process coordinator, decided to find a suitable tool to optimize their performance. The rest, they say, is history.
Stanley calls SweetProcess the most intuitive software because of its simplicity. Anybody can pick it up and start using it with little or no guidance. The ability to track employee activities on the software and assign tests to them were other exciting features that got Stanley hooked to the system.
For Atlantic Sapphire, SweetProcess does more than what other process management tools do. Knowing that you can document your process seamlessly while checking who’s done a task and when they did it makes the whole process transparent.
SweetProcess’s simplicity allows employees to participate in the entire work process. They can detect problems and alert the appropriate parties. Employees have grown more productive due to their outstanding work ethic, producing excellent results.
Good Nature Organic Lawn Care is another interesting example of a company that took advantage of SweetProcess to scale up and streamline its business processes. The company’s CEO knew that they had to get rid of their manual way of documenting their business processes to stop losing clients’ trust. The problem was that they didn’t know how to do that.
Image Credit: Good Nature Organic Lawn Care
With about 40 full-time employees and 21 years of experience under their belt, the US-based company has one of the best lawn care services. However, their biggest problem was that they always documented their business processes in a printed manual and distributed them to employees.
The implication was that the information in the manual became obsolete very often as they always had to update the manuals whenever they needed to improve their business processes.
That naturally slowed down the business, as employees themselves often lacked clarity. The only way to turn this ugly situation around was to dump the manual approach and find a better way to systemize their business processes and reduce errors. When they found SweetProcess, all that challenge vanished as it provided them with a standardized workflow management system.
Having a standardized system allowed them to expand to new locations easily. The beauty is that they didn’t have to set up new processes as the new location detects and adopts the existing processes. That meant more freedom, increased speed, and more efficient adaptation.
Aside from these benefits, the company saw a huge turnaround in its revenue as sales increased drastically. According to the CEO, “Our new sales have doubled annually, and I think part of that is because we can do things more efficiently and more people are doing things correctly.”
Is your business going through a downward spiral due to inefficient processes? Don’t suffer in silence. Instead, you should allow SweetProcess to restore life to your business as it did for the companies mentioned above. All you need to do is sign up for a free 14-day trial and experience process management at its best.
How to Set up an Efficient Process Management With SweetProcess
One of the benefits of documenting your processes with SweetProcess is that you can do so more quickly and in fewer steps than with other process management tools. In addition, the process is intuitive, allowing complete novices to use the software with little or no help.
Step 2: Click on “Processes” on the top navigation bar.
Step 3: Once the page opens, click on the “Create Process” button in the top right corner of the page. Alternatively, you can click on the “Create a Process” button in the middle of the page.
Step 4: Enter the title in the space marked “Process Title.”
Step 5: If you’re creating a process for the first time, you’ll have to create a new team. To do this, click on “Add to teams.”
Step 6: Click on “Create Team.”
Step 7: Name your team and then click on “Create Team.”
Step 8: The system will automatically check the new team you just created. You may then proceed to create your first process by clicking on “Continue.”
The process you just created will save directly to draft, and you must approve it to make it go live.
Step 9: Click on “Approve.”
Congratulations! You just created your first process.
Step 10: Proceed to add new procedures to your process by clicking on “Add New Procedure.”
You just saw how easy that was. SweetProcess simplifies the process and makes collaborating with your team members nothing but fun.
Managing your business processes doesn’t have to be difficult. When deployed properly, process management will make running a business a joyful thing. It will help you maximize cost reduction since it allows for cross-enterprise integration.
An effective process management system provides a structured yet adaptable environment that can be expanded from department-only processes to even broader processes for more business benefit.
The interesting thing is that with SweetProcess, you can rest assured that nothing is left to chance, as it helps you simplify the most difficult processes so you can spend your time on other important business needs.
Congrats! You just completed a process management crash course. Now that you have learned the essentials of process management and its application to your business, it’s time to see it in action. To do that, sign up for a free 14-day trial at SweetProcess. Also, check our free checklist that will make your journey into the world of process management a breeze.
Do it with SweetProcess, click here to learn more
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