In every business organization, producing goods or rendering services involves an interaction between multiple people, teams, and systems. This internal interaction between the various moving wheels in an organization is often defined as an internal process. When these processes work well, there is a significant improvement in productivity and efficiency, leading to greater customer satisfaction. To avoid the host of issues caused by inefficient internal processes, organizations have to look for ways to improve them.
What is an Internal Process?
Internal processes are defined as business processes that are performed within an organization without the involvement of any external partners. They are a part of the balanced scorecard method which is a metric that is used to evaluate an organization's performance.
An internal process also refers to the series of steps or actions that team members must perform in the daily execution of their duties within an organization. This can range from simple ones such as managing a purchase order to more complex ones like following federal insurance regulations.
Whether complex or simple, making improvements in the internal process of a company is essential. An organization has to invest in strategies that make processes faster, cheaper, and more effective in order to improve performance and satisfy the needs of customers.
Examples of Internal Processes
An internal process is defined as a process that can be executed within an organization without involving external parties. Several processes fit these criteria within every organization.
Examples of internal processes include:
Operation Management Processes
These are the daily steps or actions that an organization needs to take to create its product or deliver its services to customers. For instance, if you run an e-commerce business, operation management processes are those processes that involve receiving and fulfilling customer orders.
Customer Management Processes
Every business involves relating with customers one way or another. Customer management processes are a series of actions aimed at developing a relationship with the customer. Examples of processes that fall into this category include customer acquisition, collecting and managing customer feedback, customer retention, and customer communication, to name a few.
Innovation Processes
These are processes aimed at helping an organization reach new markets. This can be done by creating alternative products or introducing a new line of services. An internal business process example like this is the creation of a new line of products or expansion into new markets.
Regulatory Processes
These are processes that are vital to an organization's compliance with regulatory standards needed to retain their license to operate. Examples may include processes to maintain environmental compliance, health and safety regulations, social responsibility, among others.
How to Improve my Internal Process
Every organization looking to grow and stay competitive must constantly improve its internal process.
The following are some strategies that can help improve your internal process.
Step 1: Free up mission-critical information
To improve your business process, one of the critical things you have to do is extract vital information from silos and make them accessible for all. Data is crucial to the day-to-day operation of every organization. Without it, your team will end up flying blindly in most of their operations. Freeing up data for everyone involved will provide a plenty of insights to stakeholders, help identify gaps, and clear bottlenecks in service delivery.
Step 2: Improve employee training
The efficiency of your internal processes rests almost entirely on your team. Most tasks and processes within an organization are repeatable. But if those in charge do not clearly understand their role, it will be challenging to deliver efficiently. Repeatable processes will be improved significantly if you invest in the onboarding and training of employees.
Step 3: Improve employee visibility
In most organizations, employees simply do their work without a clear understanding of how they fit into the big picture. However, you stand a better chance of improving productivity when employees understand the objectives of the tasks they perform and the overall impact of their roles on internal processes. This will inspire creativity and help them develop new ways to achieve business objectives effectively.
Step 4: Automate processes
There are certain aspects of an organization's internal processes that can be set on auto-pilot. This mainly applies to repeatable tasks that require little to no human intervention. Automating these processes will free up employee time to focus on more germane tasks. Process automation also promotes efficiency and better performance in the long run.
Step 5: Put yourself in your customers' shoes
Perhaps the best way to understand how to optimize internal processes is to examine things from the customer's perspective. When you examine your internal processes from your customer's point of view, you will be able to notice missing or inefficient steps and implement strategies to optimize them.
Benefits of Improving your Internal Processes
There are numerous benefits of improving your internal process. When you begin to evaluate your internal processes to figure out how to improve them, you'll gain valuable insights into how your organization delivers value. This is necessary to meet customer expectations.
Other benefits of improving internal processes include:
- Elevate your service delivery
- Maximize resources
- Deliver value to your customers in the most efficient way possible.
Conclusion
No matter how efficient your organization seems to be at the moment, if you dedicate some effort to internal process improvement, you will most likely find some bottlenecks and redundancies that can be improved one way or another.
Try Kissflow Workflow today to ensure that your internal process improvement is done in the most repeatable and measurable way possible and to achieve long-term benefits for your organization.
