Process Management for Small Businesses: Four Mistakes to Avoid

Information is one of the most valuable business assets and often has a direct financial impact. Organizations need an efficient document flow, fast access to critical data and a way to separate high-priority information from background material. Business process management brings order to this growing volume of information and documents.

Common process-management mistakes

Process management creates significant opportunities, but it requires a clear strategy. Mistakes can occur when teams set priorities, define business goals, choose the level of automation or select tools. Reviewing the four most common problems improves the prospects of a successful implementation.

1. Missing priorities

Trying to automate every process at once makes a project difficult to control. Start by selecting the workflows that matter most. Common first choices include:

• invoice workflow;
• correspondence;
• leave requests;
• advance and business-trip settlements;
• contract workflow;
• other HR cases.

Each sector also has specialized workflows. Examples include:

• changing a restaurant menu;
• opening a bank branch;
• approving acceptance protocols;
• changing credit-card interest rates;
• registering a new customer;
• laboratory quality testing;
• submitting a grant application;
• running an audit.

A company may have several core processes and many supporting ones. Select the workflows whose automation is most visible to employees and management or has the greatest impact on waste and resource use. A first stage of three to five processes often provides a manageable change program, while some organizations begin with one. The first implementation builds knowledge for each later process.

2. No measurable business goal

Define the intended result and how it will be measured. For an invoice workflow, possible goals include:

• reducing the time required to deliver invoices to Accounting;
• shortening invoice coding and approval;
• reducing manual work in coding or posting;
• reducing invoice-coding errors;
• finding invoices from previous periods quickly;
• creating management reports and control summaries.

Prioritize the goals that address the actual constraint. One organization may focus on delivery time, while another needs to reduce coding effort. Apply the same analysis to business trips, leave requests, agreements, offers and correspondence. Clear goals also make the change easier to explain to employees.

3. Trying to automate everything

Detailed automation requires teams to define every path, exception and edge case. Some exceptions only become visible during real work. More logic also means more implementation effort, higher cost and more difficult future changes.

Return to the priorities and decide where automation creates value and where a person should retain a choice. If the initial goal is to deliver correctly described invoices to Accounting on time, an ERP integration may follow later. The first stage can solve the delivery and coding problem, while a later stage reduces manual posting when that becomes the next priority.

4. Selecting the wrong tools

A workflow tool should model processes quickly and remain flexible as they change. Teams benefit from starting a process before every detail is final, testing it with real data and improving it based on actual work. Useful capabilities include:

• a graphical workflow editor;
• form and metadata configuration;
• process history;
• rules and conditions combined with controlled user choices;
• changes to running processes without advanced IT skills;
• reporting and data export;
• automatic document archiving;
• browser and mobile access;
• integration with other systems.

This list is a starting point for organization-specific requirements.

Practical guidance for process operations

A process-management and document-workflow implementation succeeds through clear priorities, measurable goals, an appropriate level of automation and flexible technology. Dividing the program into smaller stages controls cost and implementation risk. The right partner also contributes process and document-workflow experience alongside technical support.

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