Business process improvement using DAM

Each business owner has to deal with hundreds of business processes. Many of them are repeatable, like demo calls, marketing campaigns, reports on sales activities, etc. Any bottleneck in one repeatable process can cause millions of dollars in revenue.

Have you ever met with situations when:

• Complaint with the client is not resolved
• Production costs increase
• Sales manager decides to leave the company?

When such situations happen you frequently lose time and money. You experience significant stress. Then, you do your best to renew the system’s functioning. You want to prevent such situations in the future. This guide will provide you with valuable tools designed to improve your business operations. You’ll learn how to improve any activity in your company. You’ll go through the process improvement steps required for the desirable business efficiency.

Let’s start with the simplest definition of business process improvement.

What Is Business Process Improvement?

Business process improvement is an approach used to identify and evaluate inefficiencies within the organization. It redesigns existing business tasks, improving their effectiveness, enhances the workflows involved, and optimizes performance.

You have to classify the business activities into one of the categories:

• Operational - the most popular tasks repeating every day. Examples: opening accounts, reporting, creating affiliate marketing campaigns, manufacturing, logistics.
• Management - focus on human resource development, budgeting, corporate governance.
• Supporting - all other tasks not classified into the previous categories, like recruiting, accounting, tech support, and others.

Each task requires regular evaluation and correction. Then you can prevent undesirable inefficiencies. If you don’t have such evaluations in place yet, you can install the process automation software. It will help to notify you of the defects along the way.

How to Improve Processes in Business: BPI Methods

Business process improvement requires various resources, proper management, and administration during implementation. Hence, to achieve success you have to follow a certain methodology. It is a specific framework, designed for the company’s guidance through business process improvement steps. Let’s explore the popular BPI methodologies, which proved their effectiveness in various companies.

Six Sigma and Lean Thinking

Six Sigma is the BPI methodology, whose history goes back to the 1980s. It was first implemented in Motorola. The idea of this approach is to provide a data-driven review helping to avoid any mistakes or inefficiencies in the current workflow. As a result, the system starts to work faster with fewer mistakes. At its foundation Six Sigma focused on manufacturing. But in recent years it developed into a more general approach, optimizing various activities within the company.

You have to understand that Six Sigma works with data to perform the required analytics. Therefore, it applies financial, project management, and data analysis tools. According to Six Sigma, the company can solve any problem within the business activity using the DMAIC framework.

DMAIC consists of several steps:

• Define the problem,
• Measure the current metrics related to the activity and the metrics after the improvement,
• Analyze the inconsistencies and defects that the job has,
• Improve the process with bottleneck
• Control to ensure that the entire system works efficiently.

One of the interesting modifications of the Six Sigma methodology is the Lean Thinking approach. This BPI methodology evaluates any job in terms of customer value. According to Lean Thinking, when some tasks do not bring value to the customer, they have to be eliminated. As a result, each activity brings a certain value, raising the company’s productivity and customers’ satisfaction.

Total Quality Management (TQM)

This business process improvement methodology is similar to Lean Thinking. But, it’s more general in terms of effectiveness. Lean Thinking puts customer value at the center of a specific task, requiring optimization. On the contrary, TQM places the customer value at the center of the company’s management and operation. Under the TQM structure, every department within the organization has to bring customers. The growth of customer satisfaction is the goal of the whole company. It's not the responsibility of management or customer success alone. Each employee has to make an impact on customer value.

Theory of Constraints (TOC)

TOC BPI methodology solves the inefficiency in the following way:

• Determines the constraint causing the bottleneck;
• Improves this constraint until its negative effect disappears.

The successful realization of this approach raises the company’s productivity, streamlines the product flow, and optimizes the workflow, eliminating the inefficient bottlenecks.

In most cases TOC is based on the Five Focusing Steps methodology, which presumes:

• Identification of the bottleneck
• Elimination of this constraint
• Alignment of all other activities with the constraint’s correction
• Realization of other possible actions to eliminate the bottleneck
• The movement to the new inefficiency

You have to remember that TOC is continuous. Once one constraint is eliminated, the other bottleneck comes into the TOC’s focus.

Now, when you have probably chosen the BPI methodology most suitable for the specifics of your business strategy, it’s time to start the process of improvement. But, what is the first step?

Regardless of the methodology, you’ve chosen for the business process analysis, you’ll have to make the management decision concerning the process improvement.

The role of the manager is to avoid such inefficiencies in the future and he has to think strategically about the business process improvement steps. You may choose to change the manager of the project, higher new personnel, or introduce the new software within the organization. In most cases, you’ll require the specific tools to perform the optimization. One such tool is digital asset management software that is specifically designed to optimize your workflow and raise the effectiveness of existing processes.

The next section will show the example of the business process improvement using DAM software.

Business Process Improvement Steps

For simplicity let’s imagine you have the bottleneck in the social media marketing campaign launch. It’s quite common when the deadlines for the campaign are not met, the materials are not ready on time and team members do not know where to find the last designs for the campaign.

Let’s explore this process and show how to improve it using digital asset management. Here, we present a list of the required steps one by one. In the end, you’ll be fully equipped with all the instruments to realize your BPI strategy as soon as possible.

Step 1 - Mapping

The first step presumes the identification of the problem requiring elimination. At this point, you have to use mapping. It visualizes all the operations that you have within the organization and determines the one for optimization. You can perform the mapping in several ways. You can draw a flowchart manually or use the project automation software to do this for you. In the first scenario, it’s quite likely that you’ll miss some tasks or even part of the workflow. In the second one, you’ll be able to see who is responsible for what within the organization and get actionable insights for optimization. You’ll find all the people involved in your social media marketing campaign and define their responsibilities at each step of the process.

Step 2 - Analysis

Having mapped all the tasks within the organization, you can start the analysis of the pain points within the existing workflow. You have to ask responsible people and yourself some complicated questions, like:

• In case we miss deadlines, what are the factors causing these situations?
• What are the main factors influencing the inefficiencies within the working process?
• Do we have activities critical for the result of the campaign?
• Why do some of the tasks have a higher impact on the campaign’s effectiveness than the others?

Driving yourself through the set of these and similar questions will help to define the pain points for improvement. It is quite likely that you verify that the main problem of inefficiency is the inability of team members to control their workflow. They need to store all the marketing materials in one place, clearly define the last revision of design files, discuss and approve the designs in one place. In such cases, the SMM campaign will start on time. To resolve these inefficiencies digital asset management solutions like Pics.io might be the perfect fit.

Step 3 - Get Buy-In

At the next step, you have to present the existing problem to senior management. As you understand, any change requires resources. It means you have to get approval for the action plan you are going to implement. When you present the situation to the senior manager, please show the following:

• The inefficient activity within the current workflow
• The impact of the existent constraint on the full cycle of the company's production
• The impact of constraint on customer value.

You have to make this clear not only to management and stakeholders but to the employees involved in these activities. When you choose a certain file management solution, make sure that your team members can use it without any special technical background. Test several solutions and organize the demo calls to ask all the questions you have. Finally, choose the DAM software allowing you to keep your data in one place and tag and sort files among the design team, and then share them with the PR team.

Step 4 - Implement

Once you have received approval from senior management and sufficient resources to start the improvement, it’s time to realize desirable changes. If you want to succeed at this step, please follow these requirements:

• Start corrections at a small scale
• Test and make corrections
• Involve additional resources in case of necessity
• Implement the final changes across all the connected tasks.

Step 5 - Review and Refine

When you’ve implemented the change, it’s time for the review. You have to monitor whether the change has been worked out correctly. Then investigate its impact on other activities within the company. It is quite possible that not only your marketing team but the whole organization will experience the improvement in productivity and effectiveness of business processes. In case any problems are verified you have to start the new cycle of BPI.

Wrap Up

To simplify the BPI in the future, you have to continuously monitor the effectiveness of business processes within the company and react immediately to any inefficiency. This can be easily done with business automation software. Using such software you can track changes in your projects, manage your workflow in one place, see who is responsible for what and remove the bottlenecks on the go. As a result, you can optimize business processes on time and prevent any inefficiencies.