Practice Support Resources

Growing Your Business
Sign in to add favourites Growing Your Business

Business processes

A business process can be anything from introducing a new client, to opening a new account, to on-boarding a new employee to structuring your website. It is the set of steps taken in day-to-day work activities and performed to achieve desired outcomes.

Business Process Management (BPM) refers to a holistic approach of optimising and aligning your business processes to meet the needs of your clients and the practice staff.  

Good management of business processes is about making the best use of your time and resources with streamlined and continually improved processes for running your practice, tracking performance and providing the same quality of service to your clients every time.

Carrying out BPM before you introduce new technology can also assist in better integrating your business processes with that new technology. Good project management, change management and performance measurement complement BPM.

Other terminology for BPM includes:

  • Total Quality Management (TQM)
  • Business Process Improvement (BPI)
  • Continuous Improvement Processes (CIP).

Why is business process improvement important?

Improving business processes can make a large difference to profits by reducing costs. Good management of your business processes enables you to make efficient use of your time and resources while ensuring your clients are receiving a quality service. It can help you gain a better understanding of your business processes by mapping workflows, eliminating waste and reducing bottlenecks.

Improving your business processes

Generally, BPM methodology has five phases:

  1. Define the processes you want to improve
  2. Prioritise those processes. Tip – start with simple business processes first
  3. For each process, map the current process and collect and analyse any relevant data
  4. Determine the underlying cause of the problem. Improve or optimise the current process based on the data analysis to create a new, future state process
  5. Pilot the new process to check that it works. Run the new process with checks to ensure it is followed consistently by all.