Business Process Assessment: Get Started With Questions by Department

This the third part of our eight part series describing why every business should incorporate a Business Process Assessment.  In previous blogs we discussed the importance of creating a Business Process Assessment Committee to get started with the effort in identifying and solving issues to improve efficiency.  The first step is to have each department elect a leader to represent each department within a company.  The next step is to develop a comprehensive business process analysis document with a series of questions.  We will look into some examples of questions to help get the ball rolling to improve your business processes.

The business process assessment begins with the committee leaders spending time with each department employee to ask a series of questions. This gives the business process management committee a blueprint of the critical business process challenges and how to find opportunities to improve them within and between the departments in your business. The answers to these questions serve to reveal bottlenecks within a company to improve efficiency.

A simple way to start the business process assessment is to ask each person within each department a series of questions to assess their workflow and assess areas to improve:

1. What are some manual or time consuming tasks that each employee performs daily, weekly or monthly that waste their time? 

2. Ask how much time do you spend working on these tasks that are identified as non-productive time wasters.  This might require some time to collect data in a time use analysis study.  The employee would be required to take time to document the minutes spent on each task.  The time is worth the effort since the goal is to identify areas to improve efficiency and productivity.

3. Are these tasks critical to accomplish the duties of your job or could they be handed over to an administrative person?

4. Ask each employee in your department what they like and dislike about the current software they use to perform their duties?  This can be a simple like and dislike list.

5. Ask what tasks do you wish your software could accomplish for you if automation were possible?  This starts to prompt the employee to think of a wish list of what tasks could be offloaded to help them save time and be more efficient in their job. 

Here’s an example of some additional questions a business process assessment committee leader would ask the Accounts Payable (AP) employee:

1. What is your check writing procedure?

2. How are AP cash requirements determined?

3. Are there requirements for prepayments to vendors?

The goal of these assessment questions is to get a clear understanding of the work flow of each employee and how it relates to their interrelated and interdependent parts of the business. The business process assessment starts with a comprehensive examination of each department within a company.  To begin, the business project management committee develops a list of questions the business project management department leader is assigned to answer with the help of employees within the each department.  This gives the employees the opportunity to contribute to the discovery process and the ultimate solution associated with each problem. Each answer should associate a weight of importance, i.e. low priority = 1, medium priority = 2, high priority = 3 and essential = 4.  This will give you an immediate snapshot of the most important issues to focus on first.

If it is discovered there is a need to refine the business process or switch to an ERP software system or improve upon the current systems via enhancements, it is our experience the employees will likely accept that change easier and take ownership in making the software change successful.  If you would like to learn more about how and why you should get started with a business process assessment, please contact us!   As ERP consultants, we have over twenty years of experience in helping hundreds of businesses become more efficient and profitable.

Posted by Keith Perkins at Accounting Software serving Sage 100 ERP customers in Shreveport, LA and surrounding areas.