When we speak about the word process, the majority of us know what we are talking about. But must of the time, I would say most of the time, we underestimate the meaning of the word. This happen very often because of the commonality of talking about processes. Well, this is another blog site that talks about process, but we’ll try to talk about it in a different way. We’ll talk about it in how you can use processes in your business for increasing the operating performance, without waiting or paying those consultants to make the job.
I have always liked the analogy between processes and nature. If we observed, the process of nature are perfect. Only imagine the nine months of pregnancy of a human being. The amount of processes that goes on during this tome is high and taking account of the precision in which everyone happens makes it more incredible.
But this can only happen with thousands of years of evolution and refinement. It’s because of that in business there still to much to do with our processes.
Going deeper in business processes, we would see in our companies, they don’t go alone. They’re always accompanied by people, technology and policies.
People
People are in charge of executing processes in day to day, producing a final result that usually is an added value for the customer. Because people are the ones making decisions and by one way o another, initiates the process, they play an important part in it.
Policies
Policies play an important role in processes and companies. They mark execution in a defined frame and moment of time. Are the restrictions that a process submits according to the requirements the same process was initiated.
A policy also makes a process different from other companies. It’s possible that the buying process between two banks be the same. But policies about amount of approval by a manager makes different from another manager in another bank. The same goes with the loan process. Policies make them different from bank to bank.
Technology
These are the tools used by the process and the people for completing the process execution. Most of the time makes the process more efficient incrementing the performance. People use technology to make their work faster saving costs to the company.
The join of this three pillars form the base of the executing of efficient processes in businesses. The search for ways how to increase the performance of these three pillars will take us automatically directly to the increase performance of the process reducing everyday costs in our companies and we haven’t gone to any process reengineering.