When gaps exist in your business operations, your customers or clients may start to express their frustrations.
Maybe your processes involve too many manual steps, causing delays in delivering products or services. These delays not only frustrate your customers but can also affect your cash flow if not addressed.
Other gaps in your operations might involve waiting for information to be manually transferred between systems. For an operations professional, not having real-time visibility into business performance is a huge obstacle.
This can leave you uncertain about the status of orders and service requests, leading to wasted time on communications—time that could be better spent making strategic decisions to improve efficiency.
Here are five areas to evaluate and uncover potential holes in your business operations to help you drive success. At the end, you can take a quick quiz to identify specific areas in your operations that need improvement.
1. Examine System Integrations
A lack of integration between key systems—such as ERP, CRM, and operations platforms—often leads to significant areas for improvement. Indicators of poor integration include employees having to manually re-enter data between systems or relying on emails and phone calls to share information.
These gaps can give customers the impression that your departments aren't communicating effectively. For example, accounting might not be aware that a service issue hasn't been resolved, or marketing might mistakenly target customers with products they've already purchased.
These are crucial areas to review when kicking off the process of finding potential inefficiencies.
2. Review Automation and Workflow Efficiency
Your ERP, CRM, and other enterprise systems should include workflows that automate processes. As you well know, this reduces the need for manual intervention, allows teams to work more efficiently, and greatly limits human error.
Let's say a customer orders 500 units, and you only have 250 in stock. Does your system require someone in purchasing to manually place an order with the vendor? Or maybe your ERP system handles that automatically?
Hopefully, it's the latter.
Even better, can your system forecast sales and inventory needs to prevent these shortages in the first place? Ensuring you have the right stock levels when the order comes in—or at least being aware of potential fulfillment issues—is important for any smooth-running business operation.
3. Keep Your Process Maps Current
Documenting your processes with detailed diagrams and descriptions can often reveal gaps that might otherwise go unnoticed. Even if you think you know your processes well, mapping them out can highlight new areas for improvement. This exercise can be performed in various teams, like sales, IT, and more.
It's important to involve all departments, make sure your maps are thorough, and keep them up to date.
Something likely needs attention if you haven't reviewed your process maps in the last year. As your business changes—whether through growth, new product lines, market expansion, or new types of customers—your processes should adapt to these changes.
Be diligent in this area. If not, you could create potential problems that are much harder to solve down the road.
4. Assess Change Management Processes
Change management. Yes, the dreaded change management.
But we can't avoid it. This is another area where gaps (very) often go unnoticed. How does your business currently manage change? Good? Bad? Ugly?
Let's start here: Do you have a structured change management process in place?
If changes are difficult to implement, or if projects frequently stall or get canceled, these could be signs of process gaps you should look at filling.
To address this, your change management process should include clear steps for:
- Requesting changes
- Assessing feasibility
- Planning
- Implementation
- Evaluation
Additionally, it should trace the impact of changes on interconnected systems and processes.
5. Evaluate Collaboration and Communication
Collaboration and communication are essential to your operations, yet they're often overlooked when it comes to formal processes.
Why is this? Maybe many people find it boring. I mean, an email is an email, right?
Regardless of the tools you use—whether collaboration platforms, instant messaging, or email—they won't be effective without well-documented processes that your team follows.
This could be an area that you simply gloss over, but I encourage you to spend some time here and really dive in. Employees need to know the best way to reach out and when to expect responses, especially across different departments. If communication is slow or unclear, it can cause project delays, unfulfilled orders, and unprepared service teams.
So, while it may seem like an unnecessary chore, at least give it a look over, you might be surprised by what you discover in the process.
Discover Your Process Gaps
Identifying and addressing gaps across your business operations is key to your company's long-term success. And when these inefficiencies are snuffed out and resolved, you'll see increased customer satisfaction and, potentially, a boost to the bottom line.
Still not sure where your process gaps are? Take our quick quiz to find out and start your journey toward improving your overall operational experience.
