Business process analysis: how to find where your company loses time

Business process analysis is a look at how work in your company actually flows, from the first inquiry to payment, with the points where it gets stuck, where data is retyped by hand and where everything depends on one person. The result is a process map and a list of changes ranked by savings. Without it, software and automation are bought blind.

1. Draw the path from inquiry to payment

Take one typical job and write down every step: who does it, in which tool and how long it takes. Not how it should be, but how it actually went last week. It works best with the people who do the work every day, not only the owner.

2. Mark manual work and retyping

Every time data moves from one tool to another by hand, mark it. That is where mistakes happen and time is lost. Typical examples: an inquiry from email into a spreadsheet, from the spreadsheet into a quote, from the quote into an invoice.

3. Find the bottlenecks

Where does work wait? Most often on the owner’s approval, on information only one person has, or on a step done once a week. If work stops when the owner is on holiday, that is a bottleneck. We wrote about this in why can’t my business run smoothly without me.

4. Measure

Next to each problem, write an estimate: hours per week, mistakes per month, days of payment delay. The numbers do not need to be perfect, but they need to exist. They decide what comes first.

5. Rank by savings and complexity

What saves a lot and is simple to do goes first. Often that is a small automation, not a new system. A larger system makes sense when the same problems repeat across several steps. See examples of the processes automated most often in business process automation: 7 examples.

On your own or with help?

You can do this analysis yourself. An outside view helps because staff often do not see steps they are used to. In a free business diagnostic we do it together with you and your team, by video or on site in Zagreb, and within two working days you get a process map and a proposal for what to build first.