Let's explore the world of workflow analysis. By analyzing a business workflow you will uncover essential insights to refine and enhance your operational efficiency, optimize processes, and improve team management.
You might not realize it, but we all have a workflow when executing our tasks (personal and work-related). A workflow, at its core, is your method of navigating tasks and achieving goals in your business. It's a step-by-step process similar to a roadmap guiding you through the completion of objectives.
Imagine yourself as an investigator within your business - shining a light on each workflow to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement.
The ultimate goal? To ensure your business functions like a well-oiled machine – smooth, streamlined, and highly efficient. You want efficiency in your processes so that you are not wasting resources and time, especially on things that can be streamlined.
There are 3 main steps to executing a workflow analysis:
Mapping the current process
Identifying inefficiencies
Implementing improvements
To make the above more practical, we’ll use the example of Sarah, a restaurant owner, to illustrate the power of a workflow analysis.
1. Mapping the current process
Mapping your current process is necessary to understand the workflow. Sarah starts her analysis by basically mapping the process her customers follow from the time when they walk in the door until the time they leave.
Practically you could use pen and paper, or digital tools like Miro and ClickUp, that’s entirely up to you. The point of this step is that she has a visual representation (from point A to point Z) of what process her customers follow when they visit her business.
2. Identifying inefficiencies
Once she maps out the process, she then takes a step back and observes what, from her perspective, her customers are experiencing.
During her observation, she notices that her waiters are disorganized in their task execution and, as a result, orders are getting lost between the waiters and the kitchen staff. This causes unnecessary delays in order delivery and understandably frustrates customers.
In addition to the service delivery gaps, she also noticed that the inventory management system was ineffective. There were many expired food items and it’s obvious in this one detail alone that she is losing money as a direct result of the inefficiency.
To round off identifying inefficiencies, she sits down with her staff and asks them the following:
What are they experiencing in their workday?
Where do they think they could make improvements?
And how would they like to see those improvements being implemented?
She makes notes and records all their feedback. Some of the best insight into our business workflows comes from the team members who directly execute the work daily. It is wise to consult with them and take their feedback into serious consideration.
These are the inefficiencies Sarah identifies:
Gaps in the order-taking process
The kitchen is taking a long time to process orders
Ineffective inventory management
An increased need for team training
3. Implementing improvements in your workflow analysis
Sarah is now well-equipped to make improvements to her restaurant workflows.
She starts her improvements by doing a kitchen reorganization to speed up the order delivery process. In her second step, she noticed that the staff were moving around too much in the kitchen, from one station to the next, and as a result, needed to be streamlined.
She then introduced a digital system for order-taking. Now the waiters no longer jot down the order with pen and paper, but everything is captured digitally, and automatically the order shoots through to the kitchen. In this way, fewer orders are lost, and there’s less miscommunication between the kitchen and the waiters.
Third, the disorganization of her team members identified a training opportunity as they joined the team in different phases of the restaurant. As a result, she introduced weekly training sessions to enhance skills and standardize the delivery of business expectations.
The final improvement was refining her inventory management system. She placed a list of items that need to be stocked/maintained in the designated areas.
As part of staff training, she reinforced the “first in first out” method where basically whatever was bought first needs to be brought to the front of the shelf and used first. In that way, she has decreased the likelihood that items would expire and therefore cost the business money in wastage.
Some of the results of her workflow analysis will be a quick turnaround. Others will take weeks before she sees an improvement and impact.
Sarah has aimed for happy, satisfied customers, busier dinner/lunch times, quicker, more efficient service, and an increase in business revenue. With the improvements she’s implemented, she will easily be able to gauge her progress in meeting these key areas.
It's vital to do a workflow analysis as often as needed for your business use case. This will ensure that your processes are efficient and that your team’s productivity is optimized.
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