Business managers focus their energies on achieving their monthly objectives and hitting targets.
To succeed, the manufacturing process needs to be regularly reviewed, streamlined and adjusted to achieve optimal performance. It can feel like an impossible mission to seek out and drive additional efficiencies, but to achieve organisational growth, they must be found.
An effort to improve productivity is not restricted to the manufacturing and delivery of products and services. Each and every business process needs to be analysed to preserve and advance profit margins, and this includes back office procedures. Low back office productivity and outdated processes can affect the business negatively and globally in several ways.
Customers
Your back office processes directly affect your customers and clients. Late invoices, payments and incorrect orders are the cause of dissatisfied customers contacting the business to resolve the issues. Employee work time is lost seeking resolution to issues that have arisen from back office inefficiency.
Staff
The lack of control over back office processes leads to a lack of resource allocation. Managers are unable to effectively schedule workload, which means that there are invariably periods of understaffing and overstaffing – the morale of the employees is affected negatively as each day has an unknown demand on them.
Business
As well as the potential to lose clients and customers from poorly defined back office procedures, businesses face the very real possibility of failing to meet service level agreements and compliance requirements. Fines may be incurred if legal requirements have not been fulfilled.
You need to transform your back office procedures by making use of technologies such as Templafy to reduce the manual workload; to standardise and optimise the processes and workflow. To understand which processes need automating, carefully evaluate where administration time is being spent, and identify areas where another way of performing the task could be possible that will save both time and effort.
Ask yourself, could anything be done better? A slight adjustment to working practices can have knock on effects that are beneficial to not only the team, but the whole business. The most valuable resource of any administration team are the people within it and their time; if you are able to modify their processes you are then able to reassign their time to more strategic initiatives that will drive greater value to the business – and this is a profit bearing gift.
If you are wanting to maximise your back office efficiency, you are going to have to invest money to achieve the best results. Do not see the expenditure as a dead loss. With mobile and cloud based technologies, restrictions to business processes are lifted, and a more flexible and collaborative approach can provide the boost to productivity that your organisation is craving. The act of showing interest in the back office procedures, and providing a solution to any issues that have been identified, demonstrates to your staff that you value them, and that is the key first step to improving back office efficiencies.
