Fine-tuning your business process

The First  - What?

A business process can be defined as the series of activities that occurs during the process of creating value for your customer. In other words, every singular effort/action that takes place from the point of conceptualization of a customer needs down to the point of satisfying that need.

This very part of business growth largely tells the difference between a startup and a full fledge company. In perspective, a start is a business entity that cannot carry out its basic service offering without the presence of its principal partner, Founder, CEO or whatever. However, a full fledge company has carefully identified and defined a series of laid down rules (SOP) for the offering that value to its target customer.  Activities within the business process can be grouped into;
- Production activities
- Stock taking
- Staffing
- Customer relations
- Procurement activities
Etc.

Why?
As previously stated, the difference between a startup and a full fledge company is clearly seen in the perfection of their business processes. Fine tuning the Business Process BP makes room for growth and expansion as your model can then be replicated in different location. Another benefit is the reduction in cost as it leads to efficiency for example creating a checklist can help a new staff render the same service with little or no prior experience.

Case Study 1:
McDonalds: A review of the movie “The Founders” will show you a clear example of the benefits of fine tuning a BP. The McDonald brothers where faced the limitations of the fast food world and wanted to create something different hence they tried several models all geared towards cutting cost and reducing customer waiting time.

A model used china wares to serve food but they soon realized that it wasn’t cost beneficial. Another was walk in rather than drive through, but it still didn’t give them the needed result. At a point they had to close down shop for 2 weeks till they arrive at a 30 sec Turnaround time TAT for customer service.  That way they were able to save time and money.

This reduce the time a plane needed to be on the ground(not making money) thereby increasing revenue

Next is How?

How can I fine tune my Business Process.

First things first, draw your customer journey From

Promotion-Customer Calls
👇🏽
Customer places order and makes payment
👇🏽
Order sent to store keeper
👇🏽
store keeper packages products and hands over to front desk
👇🏽
front desk hands over package to delivery guy
👇🏽
delivery guy delivers product
👇🏽

Front desk calls to confirm order has been received and takes feedback.

The next thing is to ask at what point are we having negative feedback?
At what points are we wasting time?
Can we skip a part and collapse the Turnaround time?
What happens when one person in the chain is absent?
So you have to Measure, Build a better model, Test the model  And Measure again,

You keep coin this till u get the near perfect system

Final case study...

A friend owns a smoothies corner and it takes about 15 mins from when the customer places an order to when he gets his smoothies. She needed to attend to more customers so she thought of  hiring more staffs. However after reviewing the BP we were able to reduce it to just under 2 mins

How?
When an order is made, she
1. Prepares the juice,
2. Pours it in the glass
3. Pour ice
4. Decorate the glass
5. Serves customer

This takes
7mins
1min
3mins
2mins
1-2mins

So we divided the activities into before order and after order...

Before order
1. Decorate glass

After Order
1. Prepare juice
2.  Pour
3. Ice
4. Serve

This saved 2 mins

 Going forward
Before order
1. Decorate glass
2. Pour ice and keep in cooler

After Order
1. Prepare juice
2.  Pour
3. Serve

By the end we had

Before order
1. Decorate glass
2. Pour ice and keep in cooler
3. Prepare juice

After Order
1 Pour
4. Serve

That way we reduced the time to 2-3 mins, so she was able to serve 5 customers with the time it takes to serve 1.

In conclusion, understand that 50 years ago it took about 5 mins to change all 4 tires of a formula 1 race car. Today it takes less than 10 secs.