If you’ve been in business for long enough, it’s safe to say that you probably have some outdated processes that you’ve been using unchecked for years. These ineffective workflows might seem unimportant, but they can have a huge impact on your team’s productivity. In fact, studies show that the average worker wastes 50 days a year doing menial, repetitive tasks—many of which could be tweaked with the right workflow improvement!
That’s where workflow analysis comes in. The right workflow design can make a major difference—as long as you go about it the right way. Here’s what to know about this kind of analysis and how to get started.
What Is Workflow Analysis?
As the name suggests, workflow analysis is a process that examines your current business workflows. This includes any processes that help your team accomplish repeatable objectives.
In essence, workflow analysis helps you break down a workflow and find areas of improvement. This can in turn help improve productivity, efficiency, and even customer satisfaction and employee engagement. From onboarding to purchase orders to vacation requests, you’ll be able to find and fix pain points and bottlenecks with ease.
What Are the Steps to Workflow Analysis?
Though there are a number of different approaches to this kind of analysis, each one will follow a few basic steps.
Document Your Current Workflow
Laying out your current processes in granular detail is the first key to success. This includes defining the subprocesses, any known issues, any reports or hard data about your process and performance, and the desired results.
Collect Soft Data
With a better understanding of your workflow, it’s time to dig into qualitative data that can help you understand the problem. This means checking in with any frequent users and stakeholders. Are they satisfied with the process, or do they have complaints?
Analyze Your Data
Take a look at the information you’ve collected. Now is the time for analysis and hard questions:
- Are there any unnecessary steps in the process?
- Is there enough data for users to perform their tasks?
- Are there ways to decrease the amount of time or money spent on this process?
- Are there ways to automate some or all parts of this process?
At this point, you can also reconnect with users and stakeholders as you work to answer these questions.
Implement Changes
Once you know what your process needs, it’s time to come up with a plan. Make improvements to the process and notify all stakeholders about the change.
In some cases, this might mean making minor tweaks that decrease the time spent on a process. In other cases, you might want to adopt workflow tools like the IFS ERP System, which can help you address your business’s unique long-term challenges.
Follow Up
Last, but not least, don’t forget to follow up! Great workflow analysis means circling back to see whether the changes you’ve made are helping your organization grow.
Streamline Your Workflows Today
Workflow analysis or Creative Workflow Management for creative operations might not seem like the most glamorous of business strategies, but it’s exactly the kind of no-frills approach that makes a huge difference. With impacts on your team’s productivity, employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and much more, it’s hard to overstate the need for a great workflow design. With the tips above, you’ll have no trouble getting to the root of your process’s problems and tweaking them for success!
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