Navigating Growth: The Vital Role of Continuous Improvement in Successful Companies
Navigating Growth: The Vital Role of Continuous Improvement in Successful Companies
If you are a growing and successful company, you are likely always working at improving. After all, business is like a canoe paddling upstream. If we stop re-inventing ourselves and improving ourselves in the marketplace, we start drifting back rather than growing and improving. It takes diligence and a focus on constant improvement to stay relevant.
In our present age, with technology growing at an exponential rate, keeping up takes time and effort. It is hard to keep up with all the mergers and acquisitions that are taking place among SMBs, even here in Wisconsin and Illinois. I wonder if the owners are tired of keeping up with the fast pace of business and technology. It can be overwhelming at times to understand just where things are headed.
One key to staying relevant and growing is working on your business processes. To grow from a startup to a thriving business or to the next stage, wherever you are in your business journey, you must constantly focus on creating processes. It is the only way to maintain consistency and scale for growth.
Thinking about our growth at CTaccess, we didn’t need much business process in the early days. There were only a few of us; we each knew what we had to do, and there was little focus on process. However, as we scaled, we had to create processes at every stage to ensure that the larger volume and more people had consistency and efficiency in service delivery.
The next step after building a business process is to apply automation. This step gets more complex because, after all, it involves technology. And technology is constantly changing. That technology we used five years ago is likely not the best way to do things anymore.
Despite these hurdles, the payback on automating with technology is huge and cannot be ignored. By following some simple steps, we can identify what part of our process might be beneficial to automate further.
Know your current business process. You may have already developed an SOP or Standard Operating Procedure. If you have this documented, you are ahead of the game. In addition to a written document on “how to,” we recommend that you flowchart the more complex processes. Our team likes lucidchart.com for this. It is an easy-to-use tool that lets you design a flowchart quickly.
Test your process. Give your document to someone in another department or a new employee who knows nothing about it and see if it has all the information they need to get the job done. This is great for business in general so that you don’t have that “uh oh” moment when someone leaves and you find out nobody can do their work, and it is great to have documented for the next steps in automating.
Find your highest need for automation.
There are five questions to ask in finding the best candidate to automate:
#1 What is the frequency of this task? The more often it is repeated, the better. For instance, a daily task usually is more worth automating than a monthly task.
#2 How critical and frequent are errors? If an error in this process has a financial or customer satisfaction impact, this area is ripe for technology automation.
#3 What is the level of dislike for this task? Is it hard to hire and keep people in this position? Do otherwise content employees hate this part of their job? If so, consider automating.
#4 Is this task mind-numbing and repetitive? I heard someone else say, “If a monkey can do it.” However, automation can also be applied to complex and repetitive tasks, so repetition is the real key here. If it is a constantly repeating loop of work, automate it.
#5 Does it keep your people from the important or fun stuff? There is always a concern about automating people out of a job, but the truth is that it seldom, if ever, happens. Automation frees people to do things that need humans, like interacting with customers and making real judgment calls.
Find someone on your team to own the automation. It’s essential to have someone on the team who is invested in automation and will help drive it forward. If you can get ownership, the whole project will go better!
Determine if you need outside help. Often, even with an inside champion, you need someone who knows and can apply the required technology. Consider working with an automation expert who knows the landscape and the tools and can apply them in the right way. This expert should know about recent AI changes and practical tools available to solve your issues. These tools could range from Microsoft’s Power Automate to specific vertical application tools for sales automation to AI LLMs for integrating AI and beyond. Often, these tools require stepping outside your current vendor’s offering for something more innovative and productive.
Business Process Automation is a powerful technology often overlooked by small and medium-sized businesses. If you would like to discuss the technology further, please reach out to Scott at scotth@ctaccess.com or 262-789-8210. We would love to help!
Scott Hirschfeld is the President of CTaccess, a Brookfield IT support company that has been helping businesses stop focusing on IT and getting back to doing business since 1990. Under his leadership CTaccess provides the business minded approach of larger IT companies with the personalized touch of the smaller ones. Connect with Scott on LinkedIn.