by Phil Ayres

Created on: October 09, 2009

Dreaming About Process Perfection
The dream of all good businesses is to be lean, efficient and highly profitable. The best approach has always been to remove the biggest bane of good business: chaotic processes. We all know that paper documents, manual processes and email destroy employee productivity and present a risk to a business by accident error or through fraud. Automated workflows on the other hand deliver employee efficiency, mitigate risks and provide visibility into operations. To work better, it is essential to improve processes all across your organization, not just focus on a single pain point. Those companies that have been successful know that there is a secret to doing this, in a way that truly transforms the business.

Dreams Don't Equal Reality
Companies have a lot to gain from the dream of process perfection, but for the majority, the goal of automating a significant number of business processes is still a long way off. There are three major hurdles that they have yet to overcome:

* the investment required in software and consulting services is enormous, obscuring the potential business benefits
* an inability to improve more than one or two processes, limiting the overall positive impact
* the fact that process improvement has become a time-consuming software project, preventing workers who know the workflows from contributing to their improvement


A Six Minute Risk Assessment
Try this simple test to see where the risk is in your organization it will take no more than six minutes. Grab two large sheets of paper and just remember that there are no right or wrong answer in this test. Try to treat this like a brainstorming exercise and not to fixate on any one answer. Ready? You may start...

Step 1: Think about the departments in your organization
Time: 30 seconds
Write nothing. Sit and think about all the departments in your organization, the employees working feverishly, and the customer that you try to please, because you are proud to do so and they pay the bills. Visualize the work. Hear the buzz of activity. Feel the pressure of employees doing critical tasks.

Step 2: Write down the key manual processes
Time: 90 seconds
Take a deep breathe and on the first sheet of paper start jotting down the key processes you have in your organization that rely on email or paper documents, and alongside each write down the name of the department the process is in.

Step 3: Identify the most important processes at a glance
Time: 60 seconds
From your long list, pick the

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