A study by Bain & Company shows that more than a quarter of all companies can reduce their operating costs by 10%, or even more, by using business and workload optimization strategies. According to the study, optimization can allow companies to collectively save more than $2 billion a year.
Whether you're a business leader seeking to optimize operations or a project manager looking for ways to better execute projects, just those numbers alone make mastering workflow optimization important.
But, before you can start, you first need to familiarize yourself with what the entire process looks like and pick a strategy for workflow optimization that’s a good fit for your company.
Workflow optimization is the process of streamlining various business procedures in order to increase a company's efficiency in a particular area (e.g., administrative, industrial, etc.). It aims to reduce costs and work output errors, lessen the amount of time needed to complete tasks, help eliminate bottlenecks, and more.
Workflow optimization revolves around analyzing and rearranging (if necessary) the steps or tasks needed to complete a particular type of job or project. This is done for the purpose of making the entire process more efficient and productive while also increasing the overall quality of performed work and products or services.
As companies grow, their internal process will inevitably become more complex. What worked when a company had 10 employees might not work as well when it reaches the 50-employee mark. This can lead to decreased efficiency and productivity and can ultimately affect its success.
Optimizing workflows and continuously improving upon them is crucial for companies that want to maintain their growth, improve productivity, and continue to be competitive in the market.
The most common benefits of workflow optimization include:
There are many different strategies for workflow optimization. Most of them will involve the following phases.
Before making any changes to the current workflow, it’s important to set clear goals and objectives for the optimization processes. Try to find an answer to the following questions:
Improving workflow optimization of a single department is much easier than doing it for the whole company. The former requires less work but will have a smaller impact on the overall processes of your company. Optimizing workflows on a company-wide level, on the other hand, will have a much bigger overall impact, but will also require a lot more work.
Reviewing and mapping current processes is probably one of the most crucial aspects of workflow optimization. This is the part where you should try to identify all areas that are ripe for improvement and that can be streamlined. You could use tools to create visual representations of current processes to make it easier to pinpoint overly complex or redundant parts of present workflows.
After mapping out and evaluating all processes, it’s time to remove those that are unnecessary in order to optimize workflows. These could be tasks that significantly increase expenses but don’t offer much in return, or outdated processes.
For example, if a company's employees are manually tracking their work hours and spending a significant amount of time doing it, it might be the right call to cut that process out and switch to a modern software solution.
Once you’re finished with removing inefficient, unnecessary, and outdated processes, it’s time to focus on everything that’s left. Do a review of your remaining workflows, consider the steps that they involve, and think about the best ways to maintain and improve them. In essence, you want to reevaluate what’s the best way to carry out those processes. Focus on answering questions, such as:
Remember, the goal of workflow optimization is to improve business results, but before making any major changes, it’s vital to consider how they can affect other processes and the company’s overall success.
The workflow optimization process is cyclical in nature, and it demands continuous observation and examination. There will always be a process that can be further optimized, due to the invention of new technologies, or the development of new strategies and methods. For those reasons, even after you’ve done with optimizing workflows, make sure to monitor processes, even if everything seems fine.
The most common strategies for optimizing workflow are:
The Agile workflow strategy can especially benefit companies that are a part of dynamic and rapidly evolving industries (e.g., tech industry, software development).
The principles of the Agile strategy allow businesses to streamline their workflows in a way where they become more driven, iterative, responsive, and customer-centric. By adopting the practices of the Agile strategy, companies are able to achieve better results while continuously improving upon their various business processes.
The main principles of the Agile workflow optimization strategy are:
Business Process Improvement (BPI) is a workflow optimization strategy that focuses on identifying work processes that are the least efficient and productive and the most prone to errors and less favorable outcomes. After identifying these processes, the goals of the strategy are to improve them and streamline them, all the while reducing costs and increasing productivity.
The main aspects of BPI workflow optimization strategy include:
Lean workflow optimization strategy focuses on, as the name would suggest, keeping things lean. The main goal of the Lean strategy is to regularly identify wasteful areas and remove them from the equation.
These can include inefficient practices, such as unnecessary administrative burdens and meetings that decrease the overall efficiency of the business processes.
The five main aspects of lean workflow optimization are:
The Six Sigma optimization strategy focuses on a data-driven approach for identifying and eliminating the main causes of process inefficiencies. The main goal behind it is to increase the levels of quality, productivity, and efficiency.
The Six Sigma strategy uses statistical information to give ratings to every business process. These ratings help figure out the risks and chances of a specific process becoming inefficient, producing waste, and disrupting budgets and costs.
The key aspects of the Six Sigma workflow optimization strategy are:
The Theory of Constraints (TOC) is a workflow optimization strategy centered around the idea that every company has certain types of constraints that limit its ability to effectively achieve business goals. These constraints can be connected to work processes or resources. Managing them effectively is what TOC is all about.
The key principles of the TOC workflow optimization strategy include:
Business process reengineering, or BRP, is a workflow optimization strategy that focuses on rebuilding work processes from scratch. After analyzing the current workflows and identifying inefficiencies in them, with the BRP strategy, the next step would be to create entirely new workflows that better fit the company's goals.
BRP, unlike most of the strategies that we’ve mentioned, is not about making incremental improvements but is about completely rethinking all the processes involved in performing work.
Key aspects of the BRP workflow optimization strategy include:
Optimizing workflows is a tough ordeal and can take time. Before you attempt it, you should carefully consider:
Streamlining processes and optimizing workflows, especially if they consist of multiple steps and involve collaboration between different teams or departments, won't be an easy feat. Just trying to figure out how it all works, where the connections are, and which links in the giant chain are weakest will require a lot of time.
That’s why we put together a list of tips that will hopefully help you make the whole process go a lot smoother.
Time, or more precisely the effective use of time, is one of the most crucial aspects of any workflow optimization process. Planning work schedules and avoiding multitasking and distractions will not only help reduce stress and prevent burnout but will also ensure every cog in your company is as efficient as it can be.
Utilizing modern technology for time-tracking can significantly help with this. It can give you a deeper insight into how much time each individual task takes to complete, which employees are performing at a high level and which are not (and possibly require additional training), various bottlenecks and project delays, and more.
With this information, you can more easily discern process inefficiencies that you can later analyze, optimize, and continuously improve upon through whichever workflow optimization strategy you choose to go with.
The customer is always right is not always a given, but ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction will most definitely make any company more profitable and competitive in the market. That’s why it’s important to continue putting customers (their preferences and requirements) as number one, or as close to number one as possible, on your company’s list of priorities when you’re implementing a new workflow optimization strategy.
Team and company meetings can be a good way to get everybody on the same page when going through the workflow optimization process. They can also improve morale and collaboration and make it easier to work out solutions for various problems. But, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Unnecessary and unproductive meetings can, in the end, be more disruptive to workflow and ultimately cause a myriad of new problems.
According to a report from Dr. Steven G. Rogelberg, Professor of Organizational Science at UNC Charlotte, unnecessary meetings can cost big companies in excess of $100 million per year.
So, the best way to avoid that is to ensure that the meetings you organize are well-planned, have set time limits for each topic that’s going to be covered, and include only the necessary personnel.
Collaboration is an important part of any successful workflow optimization process. Including employees, team members, and various company personnel in the process and encouraging them to share their feedback and thoughts is a good way to conduct workflow optimization.
By having everyone in the company take part in the workflow optimization process, you’ll not only get additional information that you can use to make the whole process go much smoother but will also help improve team cohesion and morale. Employees will feel more valued and will be more willing to participate in it.
