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The phrase "if it ain't broke don't fix it" is good advice in many areas of life. If your toaster works perfectly fine, you shouldn't take it apart and tinker with it. And if you’ve mastered the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe, you probably shouldn't get too creative the next time you make it.
That said, many people apply this phrase to business processes where it simply doesn't fit. You might have a business process that technically works - like manually entering customer data into three different systems - but that doesn't mean it's not desperately in need of improvement. And here we get to an important point: something doesn't need to be broken for it to be worth improving. A process can be functional but inefficient, reliable but slow, or consistent but outdated. Progress isn't about fixing what's broken - it's about making what works work better.
The bottom line is this. If you run your business with a mindset of "It's how we've always done it and it works well enough," you'll find yourself with inefficient processes that slow down your employee’s productivity and chip away at your bottom line. You don't want that. And luckily, you don't have to suffer it. Today, systems like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central offer powerful automation capabilities to handle those tedious tasks.
Understanding Process Disorder
If you think back to your high school physics lessons, you'll remember that entropy - the tendency of systems to move from order to disorder - is a fundamental law of nature. Business processes follow a similar pattern. Even a well-designed process from a year ago may struggle to meet today's needs. This is particularly true today, with how fast technology, customer expectations, and market conditions are changing. This constant evolution means that effective processes can degrade over time, but sometimes processes never get properly established in the first place. When new business needs arise, teams often create quick workarounds and makeshift solutions just to keep things moving. These temporary fixes can inadvertently become permanent procedures, despite their inefficiencies.
Staff turnover presents another significant challenge that exacerbates this issue. As experienced employees leave and new ones join, proper training doesn't always get passed along. Many employees express frustration about never receiving adequate training on critical systems or processes. This often occurs because they joined after the initial implementation of a system or process, missing the original training and context. It’s like a game of telephone: each time knowledge is passed from one employee to another, small details can get lost or misinterpreted. Over time, these small changes accumulate, leading to processes that may barely resemble their original design. The challenge is that leadership often loses touch with how these processes actually function on the ground. They don't know what they don't know until they ask. And sometimes, they never ask.
Process consultants learn to watch for certain warning signs that processes are becoming disorderly. Two phrases in particular should catch any leader's attention: "There's got to be a better way" and "I've got a workaround for that." These are reliable indicators that a process has degraded over time, often due to the entropy described earlier, or the accumulation of ad-hoc fixes and inadequate training. The solution starts with curiosity. Organizations need to ask questions, observe operations firsthand, and truly understand what's happening on the ground. This investigation almost always reveals "low-hanging fruit" - opportunities for significant process improvement that exist in every organization.
Case Study: Accounts Payable Transformation
Sometimes, seeing is believing. Let's look at how New View Strategies helped a client transform their business processes.
The Problem
The client brought us in to review their business processes. We started by spending a couple of days on-site, watching and talking with staff about their work. We wanted to understand how things operated on the ground. Through our conversations a consistent theme emerged: everyone insisted things were fine, that there were no problems.
So, we continued to observe. And we quickly discovered that the business processes were less than ideal. Namely, there were a lot of manual tasks that could (and should) be automated. The staff weren't doing anything wrong; they simply didn't know there was a better way.
Their accounts payable department was almost entirely manual. They were barely using the tools built into Business Central, and instead, were using workarounds to ensure everything got done. For example, someone was manually calculating due dates and selecting payments. A person was doing work a computer should have been handling. They manually sent wire transfers, pulling the data and typing it into the bank portal—a very time-consuming process. They also had a ton of manual approvals. Why? Because of all the manual errors. It’s not that this company was more prone to errors than any other company; it’s just the nature of manual processes. For example one study found that over 90% of spreadsheets created manually have errors in them1.
The client was stuck in a cycle of manual work. Nobody questioned it. Nobody realized they weren't leveraging the system's capabilities. They didn't know what they didn't know.
Our Solution
New View Strategies provided targeted retraining, applying the concepts directly to their daily tasks. This wasn't generic training; we focused specifically on how to use the system's features to automate the tasks they were currently doing manually. And it worked! One person alone saved an estimated ten hours a week. That's 25% of their time! And it wasn't an isolated case; many others gained significant efficiency as well.
How to Identify Process Improvements in Your Business
Let's dive into identifying improvement opportunities in your business. The key is to move beyond just feeling like things could be better and start quantifying the potential impact of those improvements.
1. Brainstorm and List Potential Improvements
Start by thinking about your core business processes. Don't get bogged down in solutions just yet. Focus on identifying areas where you suspect there's a better way. Ask yourself:
Write down every potential improvement you can think of, no matter how small it seems. This is your initial list, and it's meant to be comprehensive.
2. Identify Workarounds: A Red Flag!
Pay close attention to processes where your team uses workarounds. A workaround is a temporary fix for a problem, and it's a huge indicator that a more permanent, efficient solution is needed. Workarounds are often time-consuming, error-prone, and create inconsistencies.
If you find workarounds, flag them on your list – they're prime candidates for improvement.
3. Quantify the Potential Time Savings
This is where we start to put numbers behind your gut feeling. For each potential improvement, estimate how much time could be saved if the process was streamlined. Don't worry about being perfectly accurate at this stage—even a rough estimate is valuable.
Think in terms of hours per week or even minutes per task. Ask:
4. Calculate the Financial Impact: The 25% Rule
Now, let's connect those time savings to real money. This is where the "25% rule" comes in handy. It's a quick way to gauge the potential financial impact of process improvements.
Example Calculation:
If you could free up 25% of your team's time, you'd effectively save $25,000. Now, consider the potential time savings you estimated earlier. If those savings add up to 10 hours per week per employee, is it realistic that you could achieve that 25% time savings?
5. Prioritize Based on Impact
Once you have a sense of the potential time and financial impact of each improvement, you can start to prioritize. Focus on the improvements that offer the biggest bang for your buck – the ones that will save the most time and money. Consider also the ease of implementation. Some improvements might be quick wins, while others might require more effort.
6. Consider the Ripple Effect
Think beyond just immediate time and cost savings. What else could your team do with that freed-up time?
The ripple effect of process improvements can have wider benefits across your business.
If you follow these steps, you can move from simply thinking about improvement opportunities to quantifying their potential impact and prioritizing them effectively.
This structured approach will help you make a strong case for investing in process improvement and demonstrate the value it can bring to your business.
How We Can Help
Ready to transform your business processes? We understand the frustration of manual workarounds and inefficient workflows. Our team at New View Strategies has decades of experience helping businesses like yours streamline operations and unlock hidden potential in your systems, like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. We offer practical solutions and a collaborative approach to make process improvement straightforward and effective. Want to learn more? Watch our companion YouTube video on identifying improvement opportunities or visit GetYourNewView.com to schedule a free 30-minute consultation.
