How to streamline business processes

Any successful business, to some level, is streamlined and works efficiently. This includes making faster and easier processes, and seems easy on the surface but can be difficult to implement at a business level, especially across the board. Whether you’re a provider of goods, such as a delivery service, or you create products, streamlining business processes is a positive step towards achieving success. Continue reading our helpful guide to discover ways in which you can improve and streamline your business processes.

What does it mean to streamline something?

To streamline something is to simplify it. This involves simplifying or eliminating unnecessary work-related tasks in order to improve the efficiency of processes within your business. By streamlining a process, you’re effectively speeding it up, ensuring that the work-related activity is done quicker and, therefore, more efficiently.

What is a business process?

To streamline business processes you must first understand what a business process is. They are a series of activities that are carried out in a specific order to achieve a goal, and each activity constitutes a task. These tasks are what make up the day-to-day running of a business, and the success of the company is based on the effectiveness of how each task is executed.

How to streamline business processes

Business processes will vary among different organisations. Not every company is run the exact same way, so here are a collection of general steps you can take to streamline your business processes:

1. Assess existing processes and rank in terms of importance - The first step in streamlining your business is examining the current processes and ranking them in terms of importance. It may be beneficial to list your processes in simplistic terms and write down the benefits of streamlining each one. After that, rank them from most important to least, ensuring that the most integral business processes are streamlined first.

2. Seek employee feedback - Your employees are the ones who are most likely to be directly impacted by any changes during the streamlining process, so it’s important that you seek their feedback. Speak to them about the current processes and procedures to gain insights into how they feel things could be improved. Of course, you’ll have your own ideas on how to speed processes up within the business, but your employees will possess greater knowledge of the day-to-day running of certain tasks. Also, you’ll need to speak to your team to find out what they think of any potential changes and how those might affect how they do their jobs.

3. Streamline and automate processes - After analysing your business and discovering ways in which processes can be improved and streamlined, now is the time to implement any changes. For example, do you make several payments throughout each month? There are too many payment dates to adhere to, so reducing them to just one or two payment dates frees up productivity time for other important tasks. This is just a small example of how a task can be streamlined within a business, but a good example of how processes can be changed to provide more efficiency. Things like onboarding new clients, the hiring and training of new staff, or integrating your CRM with your payment platform could also be streamlined.

4. Adjust and perfect - After making changes throughout the business, streamlined business processes can now be adjusted and refined to ensure they work to their best potential. For instance, once the changes have been made and are being done daily, you may find that your idea could actually be done in a quicker, more efficient way. You will find instances like this will continue to arise, and some changes may actually need to be reverted in some cases.

Benefits of streamlining business processes

There are plenty of benefits to streamlining your business processes, and they are:

• Increased cost efficiency — With more streamlined processes within the business, you’re better able to manage finances and see where your money is being spent. Managing time with client-specific work can help you determine how much time and money is being spent on a particular task, for example.
• Improved productivity — Streamlining business processes also helps to improve productivity because of less wasted time. Making everything within the business run more efficiently means people can get on with their jobs without having to take time out of their day to perform unnecessary tasks.
• Improved communication — Speaking to your employees and discussing any possible changes in advance, and then afterwards, is a great way of improving communication within the company. Many businesses make important decisions and changes without seeking feedback from their staff. If you open up communication across the board, it can only be a positive thing.
• Minimise risk — A streamlined business has greater transparency, meaning that it’s easier to capture the progress of tasks and notice any mistakes much easier.

Streamline your Direct Debits with Interbacs

Interbacs’ Direct Debit Management Systems Online Sign-up includes customer sign-up modules to suit various business needs. These include fully compliant customer-facing secure direct debit sign up websites that are bank approved, as well as modules for internal use and over the phone sales.

No matter how you’d like to manage Direct Debit set-ups, Interbacs has the tools and advice you need to streamline your business processes and comply with Bacs rules. The built-in Modulus checking facility verifies sort codes and account numbers at the point of sale. This is required to be updated monthly by Bacs. However, the EISCD is updated weekly to ensure the bank details are always as up to date as possible.

Another of our services, Interpass, can also help your business. InterPass is professional-level identity verification software that makes checking the identity of potential customers easier and quicker than ever before. When inputting payment details, Interpass can verify the payee’s account name and inform you if the details you’ve used are correct.

We can also tailor your Direct Debit Signup Portal to display your logo and brand colours to provide extra reassurance to your clients.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, contact us today on 0161 667 0758 or email us at sales@interbacs.com.