As a business leader, making your business processes more efficient and streamlined should be your #1 priority. It’s the most effective way to make a company productive and profitable and improve communication and coordination between employees.

This brings us to the big question: how do you start streamlining processes?

Studies suggest at least a third of activities for 60 percent of jobs can be automated. Imagine what your employees could do with all that extra time and the kind of impact the improved productivity would have on your business’s bottom line.

But that’s just one of the many, many process implementation steps that help your team operate better. Let's take a look at business process improvement examples that can help you enhance work performance.

TL;DR: Business process improvement examples

• Business process improvement (BPI) is the practice of optimizing existing processes to achieve better results and gain a competitive edge.
• Examples of BPI include balancing resource allocation, digitizing paper-based processes, filling skills gaps, and accelerating onboarding.
• Other examples include shortening the sales cycle, speeding up customer service, improving communication, automating decision-making, and minimizing data errors.
• BPI also helps eliminate waste in processes and can lead to higher revenue, lower workplace stress, and the discovery of new opportunities.
• Digitizing and automating existing systems is an effective way to upgrade and enhance business processes.

What is business process improvement?

Business process improvement (BPI) is the practice of optimizing and refining existing processes to see better results. Enterprise leaders or process owners use various methods for designing workflow, analyzing and redesigning to improve accuracy, effectiveness and efficiency and then make changes within the processes to realize these improvements.

Note that the idea here isn’t just about fixing existing inefficiencies or problems—but also about gaining a competitive edge. 

Don’t confuse process improvement with process rebuilding, though. BPI helps you make your existing workforce faster and more efficient and not just create new ones for creation’s sake. It helps you meet growing customer expectations and share skills and knowledge between team members. 

BPI also makes it easier to identify and eliminate resource wastage (money, time, material, talent and opportunities).

No wonder why 50 percent of organizations are making a conscious effort to improve their business processes.

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11 business process improvement examples you can apply 

When streamlining business processes, your first instinct is likely to automate business processes. And while that’s an excellent first step, there’s so much more you can do to bring your business to its peak efficiency.

Here are a few process improvement steps:

1. Balancing resource allocation

Any successful business development process flow needs adequate resource allocation.

Suppose you end up allocating too many people to a specific part of the process. This results in excessive employee downtime and expenses. Likewise, having only a few employees work an elaborate process will make them feel overworked, even risking burnout.

Resource allocation isn’t only about human resources. You also want to use your raw materials, equipment and finances optimally to maximize results.

Business process improvement helps you identify areas of poor resource allocation and make the necessary adjustments to ensure each resource is adequately allocated throughout the workflow.

📌 Related resource: How to Build Process Flow Templates to Make Your Business More Efficient

2. Digitizing paper-based processes

Printing, distributing and storing stacks of unnecessary paperwork is a chief efficiency drain. Case in point—workers spend 9.3 hours a week searching for and gathering information, according to McKinsey. 

Paper-based documentation also limits accessibility, creates the need for storage space and increases risks of data loss (there’s no way to backup a paper-based file). On the other hand, document digitization gives you the following benefits:

• Builds a well-organized document inventory and groups all files by type.
• Allows you to create a plan for document scanning and prioritize paperwork according to sensitivity and confidentiality.
• Protects the file library from third-party security attacks.
• Makes it easy to get rid of redundant or obsolete documents.

In a nutshell, eliminating paper-based processes and implementing a digital operations framework saves time and effort and provides easy access to important information.

💡 ‎Check out our list of the best workflow management software to increase productivity!

3. Filling skills gaps

You likely have employees with specialized training and skills to carry out certain activities. And while they may be great at what they do, problems will arise when these employees fall sick, are unable to work for any reason, or go on vacation, causing all processes to come to a standstill.

To avoid this, consider training multiple team members in these skills. This way, if the subject matter experts are away, other employees can fill in to ensure the process remains on track and is completed on time.

4. Accelerating onboarding 

Ensuring a positive experience is important when onboarding new hires, making them twice as likely to stay with your company in the long run. 

So how does business process improvement help? Speed and simplicity are the key elements of a successful onboarding process. And BPI helps you achieve just that. 

For starters, you can use workflow models or a business process modeling tool to evaluate your current processes and visualize a more efficient process. Follow this up by automating critical onboarding phases, such as filing/updating documents, adding new hires to onboarding workflows, training and learning, and giving feedback. 

Ultimately, you’ll have an effective onboarding program with a streamlined candidate processing and hiring and training process in place, helping accelerate onboarding.

5. Shortening the sales cycle

Focus your business process improvement efforts on automation and digitization to shorten sales cycles and improve sales efficiency. This will hasten sales conversations and reduce the time your customers have to rethink purchase decisions. 

In fact, nearly 25 percent of businesses agree sales automation tools help speed sales cycles. For example, a sales order automation tool lets you auto-populate quotes with relevant data, speeding up the process and reducing errors.

Similarly, sales productivity tools can help your sales team finalize deals from anywhere and from any device by digitizing contracts and using e-signature technology.

6. Speed up customer service

Did you know that 60 percent of users decide whether to do business with a company based on their customer service experience?

Implement strong improvements to your customer support processes to provide exemplary service that keeps customers coming back. For instance, you can introduce standardization for collecting information when customers phone in for assistance. By following best practices for customer service, you won’t have to deal with mistyped numbers, accidentally deleted calls that lead to service delays and improperly formatted feels.

Additionally, customer service automation also ensures your employees are gathering correct information from customers to facilitate good customer service.

7. Improving communication issues

Your employees are likely overwhelmed with information, including instant messages, countless emails and phone calls. And that’s not including the tons of project management and workflow apps they need to manage.

This enormity of information to process causes employees to miss out on noting important details required to achieve goals.

You can improve business processes by streamlining communication so that the right employees have access to the right details at the right time. Instead of employees shuffling through multiple communication channels, you have set platforms, tools and internal communication software that enable team members to collaborate efficiently as well as have a record of past communication.

8. Automate & simplify decision-making

The decisions you take can irreversibly change your company‘s development trajectory, so you’re likely contemplating the consequences of automated decision-making processes.

Hear us out: you don’t have to go all out and outsource decision-making to AI. But you can reduce a lot of guesswork from these processes by leveraging big data analysis to drive your sessions.

Here are a few useful strategies to complement your decision-making:

• Create a process improvement plan with an actionable strategy for improving a business process.
• Implement process AI and ML tools to process and transform data into actionable insights.
• Use a digital asset management (DAM) solution to get one-click access to all data relevant to a process or discussion.
• Make decision-making processes transparent by documenting them and opening access to the appropriate team members.

The idea is to use tools and data management automation that help you make data-backed decisions instead of taking a shot in the dark and hoping for the best.

📌 ‎Check out our list of the best process transformation software that can help you automate, optimize, and streamline processes!

9. Speed up approval times

Most process workflows require approval from superiors. While this does help prevent problems, it may also lead to various bottlenecks, such as miscommunication and lack of visibility into the full process.

Through BPI, organizations can not only accelerate approval processes but also lower employee downtime as they wait for approvals. Automating approvals ensures employees are providing complete and accurate information to managers faster while eliminating the need for managers to backtrack to cross-check information before granting approvals.

10. Minimizing data errors

In any process involving data entry, someone in the process can provide or record incorrect or incomplete information. However, these seemingly insignificant errant keystrokes can lead to major consequences. 

Take the copy-and-paste gaffe at JP Morgan Chase, for example. One record-keeping issue resulted in a $6.5 billion reporting error that caused the firm to shell out $600 million in fines.

Yikes.

Data entry errors also halt the ongoing process, with people backtracking to find out what went wrong and where. While in most cases, the incorrect information is fixed and the process moves forward, there are also cases where employees may not be able to complete the process because of the missing data.

In such cases, applying process improvement strategies ensures your organization’s data entry isn’t causing inefficiencies.

11. Eliminate waste in processes

The main element of BPI revolves around optimizing processes by identifying and eliminating areas of waste within your processes. It allows you to save time and generate higher-quality end results.

Follow Lean principles to look for eight kinds of waste:

• Products waiting for the next step
• Unnecessary moving of products
• The inefficient motion of team members
• Overproduction
• Defects
• Excess processing
• Non-utilized or under-utilized talent
• Sitting inventory

If you find any waste in your existing processes, restructure your workflow or activities to eliminate them. This will immediately put you on the fast track toward more efficient processes that deliver more value faster.

⚡ ‎Try Scribe's free process checklist generator to create visual, step-by-step process checklists in minutes!

3 business process improvement case studies

What does business process improvement look like in real life?

Here are three case studies showing you how to get started with BPI and the potential issues you can address through it:

1. Crexi

Crexi is a marketplace for commercial real estate listings. Every two weeks, the platform releases new product features that cause both internal and external help documentation to become redundant. To stay informed and leverage the latest offerings, stakeholders are encouraged to explore the updated resources, which also serve as a strategic advantage when buying real estate leads.

The company’s strategy to create videos addressing customer questions took too long to update and share with customers. Also, the internal process documentation ended up getting outdated quickly, creating another issue for the Crexi customer success team.

How Crexi implemented BPI

Crexi’s main challenges revolved around documentation, so it made sense it introduced a process documentation tool to streamline the creation and distribution of key docs with its customers.

Its customer success managers (CSMs) use Scribe to answer ad hoc questions and quickly update internal training documents. Despite the frequent changes in Crexi's processes and products, Crexi CSMs could quickly document processes and share them with a customer or upload it into their internal Sharepoint—all in just three minutes.

2. Maury, Donnelly & Parr

Maury, Donnelly & Parr is an insurance agency that wants to improve employee productivity by accelerating critical document preparation.

The company leaders realized its staff was spending the majority of their time manually transferring information between emails, PDF and Excel spreadsheets, making it difficult for them to focus on their core competencies. Fixing the consequential human errors here was another time-consuming aspect.

How Maury, Donnelly & Parr implemented BPI

Maury, Donnelly & Parr leveraged business process improvement strategies to reduce human errors by nearly 75 percent by automating processes to generate proposals.

Company leaders implemented a software tool to auto-fill form templates and perform quality checks for fixing errors. This helped the Maury, Donnelly & Parr team to create a proposal in just 7-12 minutes, which was a sharp decrease from the usual 45-minute time frame.

💡 ‎Scribe tip: Not sure how to get started with process automation? Learn more about the major process automation steps to help you identify and integrate solutions into your workflows.

3. Talon.One

Talon.One is an enterprise-focused promotion engine that allows users to build targeted and customized marketing promotions around your customer and session data.

Its global SDR leader wanted to build an SDR onboarding program that helped ramp new hires more efficiently and faster, despite having a vast team spanning over eight time zones.

📌 ‎Related resource: SDR Onboarding Checklist: Tips to Get New Reps Selling Fast

How Talon.One implemented BPI

Similar to Crexi, Talon.One also used Scribe—but instead of streamlining process documentation, the company used it to improve its onboarding process. To stay informed and leverage the latest offerings, stakeholders are encouraged to explore the updated resources, which also serve as a strategic advantage when buying real estate leads.

With Scribe, Talon.One built a new outbound prospecting strategy and enabled a new SDR onboarding program. Before Scribe, the sales development team would take 15-20 minutes to produce written instructions, screenshots and videos. After Scribe, the Talon.One team could do the same thing in 1/10th of the time it took before.

From creating how-to documentation for every step of the SDR’s outbound process to general step-by-step guides showing new hires how to use its CRM and prospecting tools, Scribe helped Talon.One’s SDR leader to educate the team on new processes and drive consistency across a global team, effectively supporting the successful onboarding of 300 percent team growth.

Start improving business processes

Business process improvement is a steep road for team leaders, but it’s one worth the effort as it leads to higher revenue, lower workplace stress and facilitates the discovery of new opportunities.

The easiest way to upgrade and enhance your business processes is to digitize and automate your existing systems. This way, you spend less time on repetitive tasks and ensure your processes follow the same pattern to deliver consistent results.

Take your first step towards BPI with Scribe and get your documentation sorted. Sign up for free.