Why Do I Need a Business Process Library?
In our top trends of 2023 for business process improvement article, we highlight that companies aiming to remain on top of their game will be looking to build their own process libraries this year.
After all, as companies seek to cut costs and optimise in an uncertain world, they must understand their existing processes more than ever.
Enter the need to standardise processes and build a business process library to achieve it.
What Is a Business Process Library
We’ve gone over it before, but a business process library is essentially a repository of all of your existing business processes. Typically, these have been mapped and are saved in the mapping software you’ve used.
Ideally, you are able to access this process library whenever you need, so that you can study your existing processes for improvement, optimisation, training, or knowledge-keeping for future endeavours or new verticals.
Simply keeping lists of the steps you take every day to run your business is no longer enough. Having your processes visualised and saved in this way instead of in someone’s head is extremely beneficial to your business in the long run.
How Does a Business Process Library Help My Business
Having a business process library helps your business, for the same reason you map your processes to begin with.
To study and understand your business and what it takes to run it.
If you do not know and understand how your business accomplishes its day-to-day activities or how those activities contribute directly to your revenue, your business will suffer, and you will not be successful.
Success means that you’ve taken on the idea of continuous improvement, which is the idea that you should seek to enhance your existing business processes over time to achieve more efficiency.
Mapping your processes helps you find the places in the steps you take where you can implement a change to achieve this improvement over time, and test out different paths to achieve it by mapping it first.
But mapping is also instrumental for optimisation, which refers to re-visiting your existing business processes and finding places where you are overspending or otherwise losing out on money.
The goal of improvement is efficiency for client satisfaction and growth, whereas optimisation is focused on cutting costs and finding redundancies.
How does this play out in real life?
Anything from winning back a week of time in discovery to saving on 80 days worth of waste thanks to going through the task of mapping out your business processes is possible. Other examples of what you can find through mapping are redundant tasks, out-of-date documentation, or loss of time due to material sourcing that can be cut down.
And all of these spots and steps are found thanks to visualising your processes via a map with a platform such as Skore.
Skore additionally can help you locate these spots thanks to our unique analytics. Meaning not only is it easier than ever to map your processes, but the tool also helps you quickly find the spots for improvement or optimisation based on numerical data.
And Skore helps you build a business process library within its software.
In the past, mapped processes would be easily lost. And this was because they were often made with pen and paper or built on basic diagramming software that was out of date as soon as it was written.
Finding previously mapped processes meant digging through filing cabinets or papers that were lost after long workshop sessions. Additionally, handwriting and the forms of notation associated with them opened them up to misinterpretation constantly.
Not to mention, keeping them updated was a headache and a half, as by the time it was time to revisit them they would be heavily out of date. Assuming you could remember how you had preserved them.
Instead, creating a process library via software where you can keep all of your existing processes is useful not only for your improvement or optimisation needs, but also as a knowledge repository for future workers and team members.
You can use it for training for new workers to constantly refer to during the first few months of work. They learn the tasks expected of them according to the current processes and over time can provide insight into what works or doesn’t work.
Additionally, should you begin to explore new verticals or contemplate opening multiple locations, these same processes can be used and replicated in your other locations as your start off.
By taking the time to build your business process library, you are able to:
- Align the company and its processes to focus on company goals without overspending or having redundancies
- Understand your current situation and how it plays out on the ground, keeping track of your business
- Communicate with stakeholders the status of your business
- Keep all the knowledge that you have created in one place for future use for employees or yourself when growing
- Identify possible growth opportunities
And the software to help you do all of this is Skore.
Why Skore Is the Best Software to Build a Business Process Library
The first thing to understand is that, as mentioned above, if you do not use software to map your business process today, these are already out of date as soon as you publish or share them.
Business process mapping-specific software such as Skore exists to help businesses keep on top of their processes at all times, as we are cloud-based. This need for constantly updating and compiling processes is what led our software to exist.
And we’ve taken on this task with gusto.
With Skore, not only can you map your processes easily, but speedily as well.
One of the main concerns of process mapping workshops in the past was how time-consuming they were. Even the software that has been adapted for process mapping in the past, such as Visio, made it slow as building shapes and connectors would also take time.
Not so with our tool, as its main purpose is process mapping and improvement.
Our user-friendly interface is expressly made for simple process mapping, meaning everything is already there for you to simply plug information into. This speeds up the process during the workshop, allowing you to obtain stakeholder sign-offs a lot faster, making everything more efficient.
This is because we based our software on Universal Process Notation (UPN).
This makes it easy for everyone involved to follow along and contribute, from stakeholders to frontline workers, without the possibility of misinterpretation of any kind. UPN ensures clarity for process maps, which is why Skore is based on it, as our motto when it comes to mapping is clarity and simplicity.
The less crowded a process map, the better.
And the subprocess feature, viewable for example in our sample customer onboarding process map, is one of the ways in which we ensure process maps are clean, but not at the expense of important information.
Skore allows customers to drill down to all parts of a process, including the most detailed of steps that form part of other processes, thanks to UPN. Other forms of notation will exclude information at the expense of keeping the map clean, but with subprocesses, your maps remain clear. You do not lose out on any parts of the process, allowing you to have a full picture.
Our reviews feature also reminds people to check and update the processes they are responsible for, ensuring that your processes are constantly up-to-date and accessible to anyone that is responsible for them.
Skore focuses on responsibility assignment based on the roles assigned to certain actions.
In this way, we are also helping you preserve knowledge as the actions associated with that part of the process are attached to the role, not a person. You do not lose the knowledge when the individual with the role moves on.
Finally, Skore provides a unique analytics feature for you to run on your process maps.
You can build your processes and keep them updated and preserved on your library, and also run analytics on them to find places for improvement and optimisation. With this feature, instead of having to have long discussions to find the spots you want to work on or change, the software will find it for you based on numerical data.
It makes it all much more efficient and faster, as does all of Skore for the entirety of process mapping.
Conclusion
Process libraries allow you to preserve the knowledge of your business and keep it updated, so it can be reused for future optimisation, improvement, training, or expansion needs.
They’ve become possible to preserve thanks to software such as Skore, which keeps everything in one place and offers additional features such as subprocesses, analytics, and process reviews.
Ready to start building your library?