Your Business Processes are what make your Business Unique

• Successful businesses do some one thing better than their competitors. That one thing is what appeals to their customers. Perhaps it's the product variety, perhaps it the salespeople attitude, knowledge and friendliness. Being able to deliver that one element consistently is what makes you or breaks you.
• Doing one thing great is a necessity, but doing all the other things adequately is also a requirement. Managing your business process is how you go about achieving a consistent result that your customers can reply upon.
• Your costs are driven by the efficiency of these processes. To try and control office supplies or clerical costs by themselves is usually a complete waste of time. Improving the efficiency of your business process by reducing the amount of office expense or clerical time required by any process will produce constant savings without direct supervision.

What are your Business Processes costing you in Lost Profits?

• Higher operating costs lower profitability which eventually produces lower cash flow.
• Lower cash flow reduces the calculated value of a company when it comes to that time to sell your business.
• Lower cash flow reduces management's flexibility to deal which changing conditions such as recessions and increased competition.
• Lower cash flow limits the amount of money that you have available for investing in the future of your company.
• Poor business processes also produce lots of errors which require more management time responding to complaints from customers, employees, vendors, etc.
• Regularly occurring business process errors damage you and your company's reputation in the marketplace.
• Business Process errors are probably the single biggest factor in what makes a company no fun to be around.

What can you do to improve your business processes?

• Use web software to allow all the people closest to the transactions to enter the data directly. Avoid sending information for someone else to input.
• Use web software to monitor error rates in your business process. Make changes to minimize errors that are consistently happening.
• Figure out what each major business process is costing and track that cost over time. Is the cost of processing a purchase order increasing or decreasing?
• Look for accounting solutions that automate the mundane operations so that your people can concentrate on what makes you money.
• Consider using activity based costing in your accounting solutions. Activity costing accumulates costs by business process to help you answer questions like " what does it cost me to process a purchase order?"
• Recognize that business process management is an ongoing process that is never done. The goal here is be adequate in most and excellent in the few that differentiate your business.