Category: Blog

If you’re looking to improve your business and make a fundamental change in how you manage it, it’s time to consider running a time and motion study.

It will provide you with the information you need to assess your business and find where to improve it based on that data.

Not sure how to go about doing it?

That’s what we’re here to help you with.

What Is a Time and Motion Study: 5 Steps

Step one, what do we mean when we say run a time and motion study?

A time and motion study is an evaluative analysis of industrial performance. In other words, studying how much time goes into conducting certain actions in a business process. Originally conceived for early 20th-century offices and factories in the USA, time and motion studies have since been adopted by a variety of industries and businesses. 

The goal is to maximize efficiency by having measurable data amounts to refer to when analysing business processes and looking for improvement spots. This helps companies standardise their work processes and continuously improve.

Time and motion studies consist of five key steps:

First, you want to study how your business is currently running. Having a full picture of what the day-to-day consists of is key to being able to make decisions when needed. You can’t simply suggest changes without being aware of how things currently are, as you will not know the impact they may have. You will spend a lot of time watching how your team is doing things, and how long it is taking them, and how far they may be required to travel.

Once you’ve understood how your business runs, you’ll find it significantly easier to find bottlenecks or trouble spots for improvement. Thanks to the bigger picture of your business processes, you’re able to study them closely and see what’s working and what’s not working. Anything that might be affecting efficiency will become more obvious.

The next step is conducting the necessary changes to improve. Based on the bottlenecks or trouble areas you’ve found, you will take steps to try and fix them. Your goal will always be efficiency, so you may be removing redundant steps or finding ways to cut down travel time.

You will keep a close eye to evaluate if the desired results are achieved. If you’re looking to reduce certain wait times, you will be paying close attention to whether or not simplifying a sign-off process as you did it does impact the wait time on certain processes or not. Or if it impacts it only for a bit and then goes back to normal, then you will want to ascertain why that is happening.

Based on your results, you will then continue to run this study to continue improving and becoming even more efficient. You will find more and more ways to make the process better and save your team time and effort, either with the adoption of automation or with discovering new sourcing options, for example. 

This all sounds easy in theory, but once you start getting into the weeds you may find yourself overwhelmed with understanding how your business works and how exactly to get started.

Fortunately, Skore exists to help you get going.

How Skore Helps You Create a Time and Motion Study 

Skore is a platform built specifically for process improvement, starting with mapping the visualisation of the actions your business takes to arrive at a certain organisational goal. Process mapping is key to helping you and your team understand how your business conducts all of its daily tasks, and to retaining that information to find improvement spots.

How does this work for a time and motion study?

Well, a time and motion study is essentially made up of two parts:

First, data collection. This is studying how your business is run: what your employees are doing daily, what tasks need to be accounted for, how long it’s taking, what steps must be taken for processes to move forward, how far people are traveling to complete tasks, etc.

A process map is an instrumental component of truly understanding how your business runs: it helps you determine what you are going to measure in the latter part of the study, and it helps you record any deviations from the expected process. A deviation is when the original process was thought up in one way, but over time employees may have changed it for a variety of reasons.

If this is never written or accounted for, as a business owner or company leader you may well be unaware of it. Process mapping workshops that are interactive and collaborative with all relevant employees to a process become quite eye-opening experiences and help you discover how your business is truly running.

Mapping it all in one singular, collaborative platform such as Skore makes it easier for everyone to keep track of how the process is actually running. And, because of our use of Universal Process Notation (UPN), it is so simple that everyone can follow along, no matter their role in the company. 

With your processes mapped, you will begin to note the areas that are causing delays or slowing things down. This leads to the second part of the time and motion study: the data analysis.

The goal in this part of the study is to take what you’ve learned about how your business works, and think of ways to improve it so that you are spending as much time and movement on it. You change parts of a process and set some desired goals, such as gaining back time. 

Then, you let these changes run for a while and keep track of whether or not they achieve the desired results. If sourcing from a different location is as much of a time and movement consumption as your original choice, then you haven’t gained much. On the other hand, it may be a game-changer. These types of changes take time to truly materialize so you will be evaluating how they change over a significant period of time. 

But conducting this part of the time and motion study in the traditional manner will significantly slow you down. You will have to convince stakeholders the changes are necessary, then wait on shareholder sign-off to make the changes, then wait for the changes to take effect, and then may have to return to shareholders if they do not make the impact you were aiming for.

Is there a way to make this happen faster?

Well, yes!

At Skore we have a unique platform feature and tool called Quantify which is a significant help in the second half of a time and motion study.

Quantify takes the maps and data added into your company’s folders, and runs an analysis that it presents to you in a dashboard. The tool points out improvement spots based on this data, helping you make sense of all the places where you can become more efficient.

Once the problems are located, Quantify can help you explore different scenarios by making changes to the process. You can add or remove certain steps and see how the process will change – all of it based on your available capacity. 

Not only will you be able to map out potential changes, but also see the impact a change may have on the process over time. From a month to a year, it may be quite different, and Quantify helps you see it. 

You won’t need to physically make any changes just yet, and can simply discover what the best solution may be to improve your time and travel over workshops with your team. No longer will you be crossing your fingers and relying on seeing results over time. An image of what your changes may affect will be available without any need for guesswork.

Additionally, Skore’s Quantify takes it a step further and helps you create a business case of how these changes will affect your time and movements.

That’s right, you don’t have to go through the effort of building a case for your shareholders from scratch based on assumptions and predictions. Quantify will pull the data and calculations together for you in a digestible, easily understood format for your stakeholders to peruse at their leisure. Your sign-off times will significantly decrease when it’s time to actually make the change, as the future effects will be easily understood.

Conclusion 

A time and motion study will be incredibly useful for your business.

It helps you to spot troublesome steps or bottlenecks in your business processes and steps, slowing you down and damaging your efficiency.

In the age of cloud-based, collaborative platforms, running a time and motion study in the traditional way will only be detrimental when competitors will not be doing the same.

Skore and Quantify are here to help you run your time and motion studies quickly and efficiently so your business can improve constantly.

Ready to run one yourself?

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Are you a business owner with several processes in place and looking to improve upon them?

Or just looking for ways to save that knowledge for future study?

Or have a location to save all of your process information?

Then you should be investing some of your time into creating a library for your business process maps.

Creating and using a business process map library or simply a Process Library, is a critical step in improving your business and making it more efficient for all parties, leading to higher revenue.

Ready to learn how it works?

What is a Process Map Library 

Let’s start with the basics to ensure you know this is the right place to gain insight.

A business process refers to the steps you take as a business to achieve a certain outcome for your business. An example of this is your payment process: the customer selects a product, goes to the online checkout, fills in their details, the payment goes through, and they receive an email to confirm it. If any part of this very bare-bones description goes wrong, you are either losing a customer or receiving a very angry call.

Business process mapping is a visualisation of the actions of your business to arrive at that goal. Seeing the steps depicted in this way makes it easier for business owners, employees, and stakeholders to follow along. Additionally, business process maps make it easy to discover weak points in the process: actions that may take a lot longer than expected due to sign-off times, paperwork that is redundant, or actions that are being completed by multiple teams.

And they are a collaborative team effort, which helps foster team spirit and communication, as well as loyalty.

Business process maps can come in many forms, such as flowcharts or swim lane diagrams, all of which have their pluses and minuses. At Skore, we are partial to Universal Process Notation (UPN), as it is easy for everyone to understand and follow along, requires no additional knowledge, and takes into account the importance of assigning roles and responsibilities to actions.

A business map process library is therefore a space where you save all of the maps and information of your processes. 

In the past, this may have been a filing cabinet or binder full of paper that was difficult to understand for the next person as it was written in a particular shorthand.

Today, this can be a shared area in your cloud-based process mapping platform that helps you avoid any confusion or misunderstanding and is easy to revisit at any time. 

Benefits of a Process Map Library 

The benefits of having your existing business processes saved and visualized in one place cannot be overstated. You rely on those processes for many business decisions, and not having them readily available is detrimental to any organisation.

A business process library is crucial for training purposes. 

When new teammates or employees are added, they can study the process maps relevant to their roles and duties and refer back to them at any time. This ensures that they know who to ask questions to if needed, as the responsibility is assigned to the title of individual that may be able to provide insight. And that they also know what to do and how what they do will impact the rest of the process. 

Ultimately, they are able to understand how what they are doing affects business goals and can align their actions accordingly. It helps them see how they are part of achieving those goals and fosters unity in the team. 

Not to mention, keeping your processes allows you to retain company knowledge. It’s extremely useful for training as outlined above, but it is also important for you as a business owner to know what was being done before and how it changed over time.

Having your processes visible aids you in standardising your processes as you align them with your goals as a business. Once you’re ready to scale further, you can take these existing standards and expand on them.

Having your processes saved in a process library is also an absolute must if you are seeking to optimise your process or practice continuous process improvement.

Business process optimisation is key when you are looking to become more efficient or reduce costs. And continuous process improvement is the concept of revisiting how your business actions look constantly to become even more and more efficient over time.

If your initial goal is to break even in terms of action and time with what you are getting paid, the improvement goal is to go further and get paid more for less by becoming more efficient and finding spots to reduce costs or time.

Skore as a platform is especially instrumental when you’re looking to embed process improvement into your organisation.

Plus our tool Quantify exists to help you measure your business process improvement.

Once you’ve mapped out your processes, it will notify you of places in your process where you are facing bottlenecks and incurring hidden costs. You can then discuss with your team what changes you might take on to fix these bottlenecks. 

The tool will allow you to map out what those changes look like, and also help you explore how they will impact your business over time. Changing something for the first month does not mean you will be cutting out all the time for the rest of the year. Being able to map it out from the beginning is extremely beneficial and saves you a lot of guesswork.

In the same vein, the tool takes into account your capacity at the moment when it comes to suggesting changes, meaning it presents you with what can go wrong because it is not in your current or expected capacity. When it’s time to make that change, you will not be exceeding what you are capable of doing. 

Once you find the perfect solution, Quantify will also help you create an understandable business case full of relevant data you can present to your stakeholders. Not only do you not have to spend time creating it yourself, but it is presented in a way that is easily digestible for all involved parties without requiring additional study.

And all of this is possible because you have your processes mapped out and saved within Skore’s process library function.

How to Create and Use a Process Map Library with Skore 

Now that we’ve gone over the benefits a process library has, you’re probably itching to get started in building one.

Skore is a great platform to do this, and it’s easy too. 

Let’s dive into how creating and managing your process library works.

Each business has a workspace where all of its processes are saved and can be made. Within each workspace, there are folders, typically divided by team or department. This does not necessarily mean others can’t access them – there are access controls that ensure that those who are part of a process are included – but it does help sort your process maps to the different teams that are responsible for the bulk of the work.

Within the folders, each process has a name and an owner, making it easy to tell them apart when revisiting for improvement or to make other changes. To further tell them apart, Skore has a tagging system that helps you qualify processes, based on status or project type. So if there is a particular ongoing project for a particular process, it can be tagged with the name of that project. The tag can then also be retired once the project is completed. In fact you can customise the process properties of any process, any way you like!

Each company also gets its own unique landing page from which you can access the different maps for each department, complete with a URL.

We recommend that each process map is as granular and specific as possible, as the more they are the easiest it is to manage their history and revision management. It is visible to see what version of the process map you are on, and who edited the last one. Skore will save what you’ve changed every five minutes as a draft, and then you can publish it with someone approving it. They will receive this by email.

Once published, this becomes the version that is opened by default, this means the version you want to use as a company, but it can still be edited and it will show this in the edits and revisions. 

Any other changes are also saved in audit logs, which helps create trust and transparency, as are visits. Visits are useful to see how process adoption is working, or which processes seem to be most confusing.

With have all the moving parts, you can begin analysing your processes to achieve major efficiency!

And with Skore, you can also set up process reviews. This will help remind you to constantly review your existing processes, so you may find new improvement spots. You will be able to practice continuous improvement without having to constantly remind yourself to re-visit or re-create your processes because they will be saved for you in your process library.

Conclusion 

Process libraries will help save you a ton of headaches.

Even more when they’re built in a collaborative, cloud-based platform that keeps everyone involved and accountable for their roles and any changes they make.

And if you’re looking to improve or cut costs, they are instrumental in helping you figure out the best places to do so. 

If you’re ready to begin building processes and process libraries, make sure to get in touch!

Even if you have only just heard of activity based costing, you probably have already conducted this activity in your business.

Activity based costing simply means calculating how much it costs you to run a business process.

This is really useful as it helps you do a variety of things, from discovering how much lean waste there is in your processes to providing you with data to build business cases for your stakeholders.

In this blog we’ll take a look at the fundamentals of activity based costing and some of the tools you can use in your business to understand your own costs either by yourself or through software.

Ready to learn more?

Quick Overview: What Is Activity Based Costing 

We’ve gone into more detail about activity based costing (ABC) in this blog, but essentially it is a calculation of the aggregate cost of activities in a process. It takes into account the total cost of running that process, from materials, to time, to people, to movement. For anyone looking to understand their company’s finances, ABC produces nearly true costs and classifies them accurately. 

Activities are essentially anything that is a cost driver or has a cost, such as purchase orders, machine setups, or training sessions. They are any event or task that has a specific goal. You add up the costs for each to arrive at the total cost, and you will find what you are spending too much on, whether that’s money or time. 

Additionally, overhead and indirect costs, such as salaries and utilities, can be assigned to certain products or services to also keep them in mind when it’s time to calculate costs. ABC also allows companies to have a better idea of their pricing strategy. They want to at the very least break even in what they generate versus what they spend on. 

To calculate ABC, you must follow these steps:

• Map out your process and key activities – this will provide you with a bird’s eye view of how the process is running while also being detailed and help you find any discrepancies between teams.
• Identify responsibility – make sure you know whose role is responsible for which part of the process to avoid any lack of clarity.
• Determine the length per activity – while this may vary, having a rough numerical estimate is key.
• List all direct costs associated with each activity – the cost of sourcing materials, employing runners for quick deliveries, any special tech
• Calculate the hourly cost of each role – take your employees salary and calculate it based on hours per week and days per year, including additional costs such as tax, pensions, health insurance, paid leave, etc.

You can then plug the above information into the following formula:

Activity Cost = (Duration x Hourly Cost of Employee Responsible) + Direct Costs

Why Is It Important for My Business 

ABC is important for any business because it helps you to keep track of how much it costs you to run it versus how much revenue you are generating. You don’t want to spend blindly on tools or purchases that are not producing fruit for how much they are costing you.

An example of how this might play out in your business is an activity that you find is constantly being repeated because it is not done properly. There is a point in your process where it is continuously bouncing back to the previous step because something is missing. These are hours of work from your employees you are not getting back and could be dedicated to other projects. 

In a similar vein, you can also think of automation. 

There are a lot of manual tasks companies need to do, such as logging appointments, sending out follow-up emails, filling out certain fields in a CRM, and more, that can be easily automated or simplified. Manually passing information from spreadsheets to a CRM to an email marketing tool are all tasks that take up time and slow down the process. Time that you lose as a business owner and that could be used for other projects or revenue-generating tasks instead.

Conducting activity based costing helps you find these issues with numerical, hard data. By utilising the formula you can continuously check the status of your processes and whether you are making revenue or losing. 

And you can start thinking of ways to improve it by experimenting with the numbers.

Say you remove a step that is duplicated or automate a certain activity. You calculate how much time you gain back and how much it might cost to automate with different tools. 

This makes it a lot easier to convince stakeholders and employees when it’s time to make a change in the process.

Activity Based Costing with Skore: Introducing Quantify 

Skore’s first mission is to simplify processes for all parties involved and to be a platform solely dedicated to business process mapping. You no longer need to rely on piecing together several tools to map out your process, nor do you need to fear any miscommunication as standardised out platform with Universal Process Notation (UPN).

For ABC, Skore provides you with a collaborative, cloud-based platform to build your processes as they currently exist. It’s easy to involve all relevant team members and have them contribute to the visualization of the tasks they do every day.

But mapping out processes is not enough if you want to truly have them impact your organisation positively. It’s great that they’re mapped out, but now it’s time to add data and run some numbers.

Especially if you want to easily calculate ABC and accurately forecast changes, not only immediate solutions. Our tool Quantify is here to help you out.

Once your process is mapped, you can add details such as how long it’s taking for certain steps to finish before moving on to the next. You can also add the direct costs associated with each step, as well as the hourly cost to the assigned role responsible. 

With this data, Quantify will calculate ABC for you.

On the main dashboard, you will find the total cost of the entire activity per week, a breakdown of the fixed cost versus role cost, the most expensive activities, and your most expensive roles. More in-depth analysis is available as well, and you haven’t had to do any calculating yourself so there’s no need to account for human error. The numbers are provided to you as soon as you input the necessary data. 

With this information, you can then start to use Quantify more readily to explore different options. You can remove certain activities or switch responsible roles to see how they may impact the cost of the process, if at all. 

And you can also see the impact your changes might have in the future, not just in the immediate numbers, so that you can be even more accurate when it comes to making decisions about what to change. While the numbers may not always be accurate as you are approximating them, especially time spent on tasks, it will provide enough of a general idea to make a more informed call when you’re deciding how best to improve.

Quantify will also help you identify bottlenecks and other areas in your process you can troubleshoot to be more efficient and further optimise your business.

And best of all, if you need to explain to shareholders the reasoning behind your changes, Quantify can help you prepare a business case. It will include all relevant data, calculations, and forecasting in a way that can be easily understood so that you can get sign-off on the changes a lot faster.

Conclusion 

Mapping processes is a great start, but at the end of the day, numerical data is especially important when making the decision to change any part of a process. It provides you with a clear picture of where you might be overspending, be it time or money, and it gets you thinking about how you might be able to save.

Activity based costing is one way that can easily help you determine where you need to reconsider your spending. And it can be far more nuanced than simply removing a role or not renewing a subscription.

To make sure you get the full picture and all possible outcomes, at Skore we’ve developed Quantify. 

Informed business decisions need hard data that does not take a long time to calculate and accounts for several outcomes. Quantify does just that for users in a matter of minutes, allowing them to explore all the potential scenarios removing certain costs will have and helping them find the best option.

If you’d like to learn more about how Skore can help you effortlessly calculate ABC going forward then don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team today.

Continuous improvement process management should be the goal for any organisation seeking long-term success.

After all, it signifies care for how things are being run and an interest in constantly making your business work better for both clients and staff alike.

Staying on top of it all can be an exercise in patience, especially if you don’t have the right tools on your side.

The Importance of Continuous Improvement for Operational Excellence 

Let’s begin by defining our terms. Continuous improvement, which comes from the world of manufacturing, is the idea of incrementally enhancing your existing business processes to be more efficient, thus leading to greater growth and success. 

Operational excellence, which we’ve covered in past blogs, is what the application for continuous improvement to your processes can result in. You achieve operational excellence when everyone in your business understands how their particular job and role benefits your customers and thus your company. 

As we’ve seen before, by practicing continuous process improvement, you remain updated on how your company is doing. You can adjust accordingly to new trends or technology available to help you be even more efficient. 

Continuous improvement is at its essence a philosophy and practice with a set of tools and techniques. The key is to involve and engage your entire workforce in continuously monitoring and improving, or thinking of ways to improve, how they are working. 

What you want is to identify and fix any inefficiencies in your processes. And a great way to scale this is to directly involve your workforce, who deal with these processes every day, instead of solely relying on an internal or external team of experts.

By explicitly involving your workers in this, you also ensure open communication and trust as you are openly aligning your business goals with your processes. They can see how what they do impacts the business as a whole.

This helps to foster and create team spirit which provides resilience in the face of unexpected or large-scale changes when necessary. They are just as involved and dedicated as you in a management capacity.

If you want to achieve operational excellence, then, it is clear that continuous process improvement is a large part of arriving at that goal.

What else can you gain from it?

How Continuous Improvement Process Management Leads to Cost Reduction 

Given the above, it is no surprise that  continuously improveming processes will lead to a reduction in costs for you as a business owner. After all, the goal is to maximise efficiency and to constantly be on the lookout for ways to do so.

This can be anything from automating certain pesky tasks to free up your team to fulfill other duties, to cutting down delivery times or getting rid of documentation, technology, or machinery that is outdated and more costly than it’s worth.

You are constantly analysing how your work is reflected in how much you are being paid and making. You can then determine quite quickly how much you are spending over that amount, and then begin to study processes to find those spots for improvement.

So, how do you go about implementing this philosophy in your business?

How to Begin With Continuous Improvement Process Methods

The first step is to go back to the drawing board and map out your processes as they exist today. Involve your entire workforce in this so that they feel that they are part of it, and so that you have the full picture. If you are unsure about how to do so, we have a great blog on how to map your business processes.

Many companies feel that this is a daunting task, and it can be, especially when you are just beginning to map out how your business works. It shows you how much you don’t know, or how inefficient certain aspects are, and that is always a hard pill to swallow. And it is a time-consuming task.

You may be tempted to hire a team of experts, and while they will provide you with a lot of specific knowledge, it is always best to involve your workers as much as possible, it is also possible to do a lot of the work yourself. If you do not embed the tools and techniques needed to truly embrace continuous improvement in your entire team, your business will likely fall short of the predicted benefits the suggested changes should bring.

Your expert team should therefore act as a North Star to the rest of your workers. Engaging everyone in the process of discovering how you run your business, how it actually affects your bottom line, and what effect each worker’s contribution has on your goals allows you and your organisation to hit the KPIs you are after. 

But you must all be on the same page from the get go.

A great way to ensure this? 

The right tool is at your side. 

Use Skore to Continuously Improve Your Processes 

With Skore, our clients have a powerful ally for their continuous process improvement and operational excellence goals. 

A cloud-based, collaborative platform with simplified descriptions that are clear and understandable in an easy format, Skore knows clarity is key for process mapping and process improvement. Built on Universal Process Notation (UPN) to avoid the misunderstandings caused by other process notations, Skore also outlines who is responsible for what and allows you to retain that knowledge for future use and analysis.

But Skore does even more for those aiming to continuously improve processes.

Thanks to its process-driven framework, the platform helps identify specific opportunities for improvement. It can capture and demonstrate ROI thanks to its Quantify features which provide you with a dashboard of company analytics at the snap of your fingers. 

You can then use these analytics in presentations to your stakeholders. The numerical data creates a business case for you to demonstrate to them how you can do more with less. Presented in a digestible format, it will help you gain access to additional funding or resources. Your sign-offs will be significantly quicker if you can provide simplified analysis to go with your reasoning. Resistance to process changes will lessen as you will be able to confidently show that the changes and improvements you are after are driven by facts. 

And if they want to take a closer look, stakeholders need only to access Skore’s process library themselves, either during a process mapping workshop or on their own time. They will be able to see all the same data and request a drill down into the everyday activities your workers are doing, even subprocesses, to understand why you, and Skore, are suggesting these changes. This opportunity for high-level stakeholders to have such a comprehensive overview of your business is a game changer for sign-off speed.

You are visually aligning your business process to the business goals, demonstrating how your changes will lead to improvement for both your workers and your stakeholders in one fell swoop. 

Through Skore, anyone involved in your business and its processes can is directly involved via the platform. Our process review encourages users to create calendars and reminders to constantly seek improvement points or think about what changes can be made, and comment accordingly. 

All of these can be tracked and taken into account whenever it’s time to do a wider analysis of the process. And it means that, simply by utilising the platform, you are constantly improving your processes and thinking about how you can make it more efficient as a company.

You do not need to hold large workshops on a monthly basis or have weekly meetings that could have been an email. You do not even have to set up reminders for yourself to think about your processes.

With Skore, all of this can be set up directly by the platform, and then delegated to the appropriate team members. Our goal was to create a collaborative process mapping and management platform, with a focus on the philosophies behind business process management. As every company is aiming for operational excellence, being able to help companies aiming for continuous improvement processes was one of our top priorities. 

Conclusion 

Every business, whether they are aware of it or not, is run on processes. 

Whether they try to fight their processes or work on them to improve them is what separates a successful venture from one that may not last long. 

With Skore, we hope to help as many businesses interested in constantly improving and growing as possible.

Get In Touch

This blog was written by Joe Williams

In this series of blogs, we are looking at what rising costs could mean for the Retail industry in 2023 and sharing some useful tips on where you can begin to look for cost savings.

Staff turnover and knowledge loss prevention are key challenges within the Retail industry. In fact, it has one of the highest staff turnover rates. A whopping 60% are considering leaving their jobs in the next few months and only half are looking to stay within the sector. Although this problem is widespread within the industry, the pain is often most acute when there is in particular a lack of training in place for new employees and few standardised processes. 

So how can we mitigate this problem? – First consider employee satisfaction. Retailers need to offer competitive salaries and working conditions. Most retail workers expect some flexibility in their schedules and the latest technology to support their success. Once you are confident that you have a competitive job offering, it’s a good idea to consider your onboarding process and how you train new members of staff. 

Are you confident that you have a set of processes new employees can follow, or are they taught on the job?

New employee training and ongoing regular staff training are crucial for business success. This is even more pertinent in the Retail sector that has high staff turnover. Maintaining efficiency in business operations is an ongoing battle. Knowledge management tools should be in place to ensure that everything is documented, repeatable and scalable. Not only does this help ensure compliant business operations, but it also helps to create the ‘training manual’ for an organisation. We shouldn’t expect staff to know how to do everything. We should be providing them with an up-to-date source of information/process library that they can refer back to. understand and follow. 

After all, we are all creatures of habit. It is often the case that the knowledge of how best to do a particular task is not well documented. Perhaps it’s only ever done by a single person. As soon as that person leaves the business, costs are often incurred by having to train new staff. Or the knowledge is lost and someone has to rework the whole process entirely.

Having a central process library that everyone can understand, provides a single source of truth for the organisation to leverage. This keeps everyone on the same page and minimises the disruption caused by staff turnover. 

Creating diagrams of business processes that can be understood by everyone – from the floor worker to the CEO is essential. Skore is a simple yet powerful process mapping and improvement tool that connects processes with roles, systems, costs, time and videos or documentation. It also leverages the easy-to-understand UPN methodology. Enabling users to create a multi-layered process library. A valuable asset for knowledge management and reducing unnecessary costs. 

If you’d like to chat about how Skore can help you have better knowledge management, or just find out more about the platform, please get in touch joe.williams@getskore.com 

Business Process Management success is not an unattainable goal, you just have to make the correct adjustments. 

Have you been working on business processes since the pandemic but still not seen much engagement or adoption from your organisation?

Or worked with experts and still remain confused as to where the value lies?

Then this blog is for you.

Here are three reasons why you might be falling behind that you should consider.

Lack of Standardisation 

One of the biggest headaches when it comes to business process management and business process mapping is standardisation.

And this starts from the very beginning of an understanding of your processes.

Take your mapping notation. If your business’ notation is not standardised, then no one is on the same page.It’s like reading the shorthand of someone who mapped out a process with pen and paper fifty years ago, and disagreeing now if what you are reading means deliver or receive. 

There are different ways to map out your processes, flowcharts and swim lane diagrams to name a few examples. Similarly, there are different ways to approach completing those processes, such as BPMN.

The overwhelming issue, however, is the lack of standardisation. Mapping diagrams and BPMN leave too much open to the interpretation of each individual either reading or mapping the process for the first time. In the case of BPMN, there is also the need for studying too many additional symbols and signs. Over time, this will only become a problem as different iterations of workers in the same role may understand and reinterpret certain parts of the process differently. 

It is in this search for standardisation from the get-go that Skore was based on Universal Process Notation (UPN). A notation that is easily understood and which leaves no room for re-interpretation, it is the cornerstone on which you can begin to standardise all of your processes. No more inaccuracies or uncertainties when running workshops, analysing your data, or training new hires. 

Furthermore, with Skore your team will be more engaged than ever.

This means you may discover differences in how different workers perform tasks in different locations, as well as unnecessary tasks or paperwork being completed that are time-consuming and serve no purpose. Because you have no standardised process in place, you will run across these scenarios constantly as you are studying your processes.

To find these spots, it is essential that you map out everything in real time as faithfully as possible, and talk to all involved parties. After all, they are the ones completing these steps on a daily basis. 

Based on what you find, you can then make the appropriate changes to each process that best fit. Once you have a master process in place, you can begin to examine your behaviours throughout the company.

It’s easiest to do when you first start mapping out your processes, but it can always be revisited over time, and it should if you want to keep improving. After all, new technology or methods are always available, so continuously re-visiting and re-standardising your existing processes is key to success.

Standardise your business processes from day one, and your business process management will be a success. 

Lack of Clear Responsibilities 

Another major hurdle for business process management is a lack of clarity when it comes to roles and assigned responsibilities.

If there is any uncertainty regarding who is responsible for approval or for finishing a certain step, a process will grind to a halt and move at a glacial pace. This inefficiency is the last thing you want, as it will negatively impact the rest of the business.

There should be complete transparency and clarity regarding which role is responsible for what tasks, and what they look like. The best way to overcome any uncertainty is to assign a role to each step so it is really clear.

Other options for mapping out your processes present responsibilities in a typically confusing addition. At Skore, we knew how important this aspect of a process map is, so we include it right below the activity box, and we base it on a person’s title. After all, an employee may leave, but the title will remain.

Additionally, we recommend RATSI notation as a way to further ensure a quick understanding of the role a title plays in the process. RATSI stands for:

• Responsible – who is the person making sure the activity is done satisfactorily enough to move on to the next part of the process, typically a manager or director figure.
• Authority – ultimately, who is in charge of the activity or decision should anything need to be elevated, usually not your everyday worker, more of an executive.
• Task – who is actually doing the activity, your everyday frontline worker. 
• Support – a support figure that can provide input in particularly exceptional situations or cases, for example, a subject matter expert (SME) being invited to a sales call to support the sales team. 
• Informed – someone who is informed when an activity or task is completed, whether successfully or not, most likely someone that is part of your analytics team.

In Skore, when you are assigning a role to a task, you will see these letters next to the role, providing a wider picture of what their involvement may be. You can also look at role descriptions and the similar tasks those roles fulfill to double-check that the role being assigned a task is correct. You can use any responsibility matrix you like for example RACI, RATSI etc. 

As Skore is a collaborative tool, everyone involved in a process can then see who is responsible and contact them directly or ask them for guidance if needed. This is especially important for retaining knowledge as well: new hires can access the process library during training and ask the correct person questions, and so can company leaders when evaluating processes.

Skore is also capable of providing a bird’s eye view of this to make sure everyone is completing their tasks through its Quantify analytics.

Lack of Good Quality Analytics 

Business process management involves decision-making, and to make the best decisions, you need data.

A business process map is extremely useful, as are the conversations that arise during the mapping process, but you cannot know the exact effect your change will have without having access to numerical data. And even then, if your processes are delayed, you may be missing out on key data necessary to truly make decisions.

If you’re slow, then your stakeholders will be even slower. After all, you need data to convince them to make a change, and that data will be studied closely by them. Anything that may not add up will result in questions and a further slowing down of the entire process.

Access to immediate, high-quality analytics is absolutely crucial for business process management success.

Fortunately, Skore has Quantify.

Unique to Skore, Quantify allows you to input all your processes and data into the platform before running all of the analysis that you may need. As soon as all the information is in, you will have a dashboard with all the relevant data displayed, plus delays, costs, and spots for improvement highlighted.

With Quantify, you can study your process data quickly and determine where you want to try to improve. Once you’ve found those areas you can then also run an analysis to see what making a change will look like in the future. The platform will take into consideration your capacity and help you understand what is possible as well.

Based on different scenarios, you can then select which one is best for you to move forward with. The Quantify feature will then help you create a business case for change that you can present to your stakeholders. With this data readily available, you will significantly cut down on wait time for approval and be able to enact the changes as needed confidently and securely in your decision. 

When building Skore, we were well aware of the necessity for quality data and analytics to achieve business process management success. Quantify is a testament to this awareness, and we are proud of its unique capabilities and how it has helped our clients across the board.

Business Process Management Success is in your grasp.

Business process management success requires dedication and work, and it must be continuous.

With the right tools, however, a lot of it can become significantly easier.

One such platform is Skore, designed specifically for business process mapping and management in mind.

If you’re determined to meet and exceed your business process management goals this year, we’re here to guide you.

Get In Touch With Our Team

One thing you need for your business processes to run smoothly?

An awareness of who is responsible for what and when, in your processes. 

In other words, clearly defined roles in the process and their associated responsibilities.

At Skore, we’ve made it a point to include this important aspect of business process mapping in our platform via the RATSI framework, which is a bit different from RACI. It stands for assigning the responsibilities based on:

• Responsible – who is the person making sure the activity is done satisfactorily enough to move on to the next part of the process, typically a manager or director figure.
• Authority – ultimately, who is in charge of the activity or decision should anything need to be elevated, usually not your everyday worker, more of an executive.
• Task – who is actually doing the activity, your everyday frontline worker. 
• Support – a support figure that can provide input in particularly exceptional situations or cases, for example, a subject matter expert (SME) being invited to a sales call to support the sales team. 
• Informed – someone who is informed when an activity or task is completed, whether successfully or not, most likely someone that is part of your analytics team.

The reason why we focus so heavily on roles and responsibilities in our platform is that if it’s not done properly, organisations suffer.

Let’s take a look at why.

Difficulty 1: Accepting Sign-Off 

One of the most common causes of a business process bottleneck, signing off can sometimes end up being a game of hot potato when it comes to responsibilities. And can be what slows everything down. 

If it is at all unclear who is responsible for what activity in your process, things can come to a standstill, and your business will suffer for it. 

The clarity in signing off and the steps associated with it is essential and needs to be incorporated into your process as soon as possible. With Skore, we make it easy for you to do so.

Each of our activity boxes has a Who? space at the bottom of the box to assign the correct title to the activity. Next to each title, you can also assign a RATSI (or any other responsibility matrix) letter, to indicate the type of role they have within the process. This helps ensure that it makes sense and that several bases are covered as needed per task. 

Additionally each title, or role, has a set of responsibilities and activities that align with the activity which is easily visible, either when you’re building the process, analysing it for improvement, or studying it as part of training. 

Without a RATSI framework, knowing who is in charge of moving the process along via approval can be extremely difficult to pinpoint. 

Other forms of mapping such as swim lane diagrams or flowcharts do not place as much importance on the visualization of the responsible role for each process task. But this is because they were not created with business process mapping in mind.

For business processes to move along, certain roles must be made responsible for certain tasks. Otherwise, people are difficult to pin down and could refuse responsibility for a process step, slowing everything down and affecting your efficiency as a company. Understanding the responsibilities of a role and transparently communicating them in a map is a necessity for business processes to run smoothly.

When building Skore, we recognised this limitation in other forms of mapping, and sought to fix it. This is why we use Universal Process Notation (UPN) to avoid confusion, and why we employ the RATSI matrix. You cannot shirk responsibilities when they are clearly shown next to your role and your role is highlighted as responsible for a necessary task to move the entire process along. 

If you do not use Skore or our notation or matrixes, you are most likely struggling with obtaining approval and being slower than you could be. 

Difficulty 2: Required Compliance & Risk Overviews

With the rising need for compliance and risk overviews throughout various industries, it is imperative for businesses to know who is responsible for ensuring that they are falling within the correct guidelines.

Any slowdown in being able to be sure that the necessary steps are being taken will negatively impact any business. 

If you’re in tech, where everything moves fast, you are probably feeling this heavily right now.

Cybersecurity has never been more necessary, and there are new regulatory standards to adhere to constantly. The amount of changes you are making to comply with the new standards to mitigate risk, and the speed at which you are trying to make them, is probably new to you. But it might also be something that is slowing you down significantly.

With new measures, your workers may be unsure who is responsible for approval, or the responsible party may be difficult to track down. Especially if your processes aren’t mapped and available to relevant team members.

In a worst-case scenario, if you’re in food and beverage, it can actually lead to perishable products being lost. It would be due to the amount of time wasted without having a clear idea of whether you are complying with laws. And this, of course, results in a significant loss of revenue that you then have to compensate for out of pocket.

All because you didn’t know who was supposed to be in charge of the risk and compliance overview. 

With RATSI and Skore, you can move past this concern.

Workers can refer to a process map and find who the correct role should be for approval in this situation. Even when things are changing fast, extrapolating the information as you build a process is quick based on their existing tasks and the RATSI matrix.

If you’re unsure, you can also utilise Quantify to study who is approving the quickest in different areas, and plan your process accordingly.

Above all, transparency regarding responsibility is key when workers have to find the right approval for risk and compliance changes. 

Difficulty 3: Knowledge Retention 

Finally, without RATSI, knowledge retention becomes nigh on impossible.

Our clients have greatly benefited from this aspect of Skore over time, and it is why we have written so much about the importance of process libraries.

While employees come and go, and processes can change, it is imperative for a business to hold on to that information. Without information on how a process is being done at this particular point in time, it becomes impossible to analyse processes for improvement and train new hires.

But even that becomes difficult if RATSI is not implemented and used by the organisation.

RATSI allows roles and responsibilities to be assigned thanks to a pre-determined matrix, and Skore has simplified it even further so that the role is the focus, and its particular capability is highlighted. 

If you are studying a process map to improve or optimise it, or you are preparing to train new hires, you need to know what role has what responsibility within the process. New hires can then learn who to ask for help, and you know who you can ask for further details on a process if you’re looking to make positive changes.

Additionally, it helps to keep the knowledge within the company and be passed down, and potentially duplicated if the company grows.

Without RATSI, you only end up with half the information you need to truly improve or train. 

Conclusion 

Assigning roles and responsibilities is a key component of any business. It is especially important when it comes to business processes, since if you do not know the correct person to turn to for questions or approvals, a process will stall.

Skore recognised this importance, and so when it was being built, roles were incorporated directly into the mapping process.

Skore focused on  UPN because it knows the importance of a role for an overall process to be it’s most efficient. And when it was looking to recognise this and improve on it for anyone interested in their business processes, Skore also started recommending the RATSI matrix.

Without it, knowledge of who does what becomes a bit more difficult than it needs to be.

If you’re looking to speed up approval times or fully understand who is responsible for what in your company, you’ve come to the right place.

Our team is ready to help you gain control of your business processes, simply get in touch

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It can be hard to truly see the effect your changes are having on your business until a lot later.

You might be cutting costs on what you discover is the wrong thing, or you might be overspending on a tool that is not truly worth it, even if it seems like it is.

The best way to tell if your changes are having any effect? Numbers.

To truly arrive at business process improvement, you need to pay attention to the numbers and measure it constantly.

Let’s dig into how.

What Is Business Process Improvement?

Firstly, let’s understand what is meant by business process improvement.

We’ve written about business process optimisation in the past, a practice focused on efficiency and cutting costs above all.

Business process improvement is similar, except the end goal is to arrive at overall success. Cutting costs is more of a side effect than a final goal of the re-engineering process that takes place.

The concept of continuous process improvement has become the norm that most companies strive for.

Essentially, you are continuously studying and analysing your process to make them as efficient and successful as possible. Everything a client is paying you should be reflected in the various steps of your process for it to be worth it. 

Anything extraneous to this can be studied and improved upon, such as wait times, resourcing locations, certain tasks, or documentation. 

Everyone involved in your business, from top to bottom, should be aware of how the work they do impacts your business goals. By involving them directly, you can ensure that you have folks constantly thinking about how they might do their job better.

While at first, this may seem simple enough, it is trickier than you might think. A business process map to help you visualise how your business is working thanks to software such as Skore is just the tip of the iceberg.

Importance of Analytics for Business Process Improvement 

It should go without saying that analytics and numbers are incredibly important for business process improvement.

But what type of analytics might you use for improvement purposes? Here are some examples:

Firstly, you can use analytics to improve employee productivity and engagement. By studying your workers workflows and patterns, and engaging with them, you can learn how to best serve both them and yourself. You can boost morale and productivity as well.

Secondly, streamlining operations becomes easier than ever. Without certain KPIs or results to study, it is difficult to truly and conclusively find spots in the process where you feel confident a change will lead to positive results. It’s one thing to have everything mapped out for visualisation purposes, it’s another to also have the corresponding necessary data available to make a decision.

Thirdly, you can track consumer behaviour and improve their customer experience. There is a breadth of data and analytics available regarding consumers that businesses can use to improve customer-facing processes, by personalising their experience, and therefore improving customer satisfaction.

Fourth, based on this same data, and by additionally monitoring changes in the market or industry, businesses can now launch a new product or service confidently. By studying their data, they will know what will appeal to their existing target base and potentially be appealing to a new one. If they’re already changed their existing processes accordingly, they can replicate them and utilise them in this process as well.

Fifth and finally, you can ensure your decision-making is data-driven, which is key for getting stakeholders on board. Sign off is significantly longer from stakeholders if you cannot provide them with explicit, numerical evidence for why you are making those changes. Your processes and improvements would no longer stallwhen it’s time to make the big decisions.

Evidently, then, analytics is quite an important aspect of business process improvement, and a useful one for measuring how you are doing. 

But how can you obtain those necessary numbers? 

Introducing Skore’s Quantify 

The good thing about Skore is that, besides providing you with an easy-to-use, collaborative business process mapping platform, it also has Quantify to help you have those numbers ready a lot faster. 

Both for current analysis and for hypothetical changes, Quantify will provide you with the data you need based on your inputs into the tool. 

Quantify will help you:

• Identify hidden costs and bottlenecks in your process: based on your process maps, Quantify will discover any step that may be costing you time and money. Notably, these tend to be moments such as wait times during approval steps, but no stone goes unturned with the analysis of the information you have inputted. You will have conversations regarding how long certain steps are taking with your workers, and you will be continuously surprised at how many of these opportunities you might have.
• Understand the impact of changes: finding these hidden costs and bottlenecks will result in coming up with changes to overcome them. Quantify will help you map out what those changes could be, and how they could impact the process as a whole, so that you are aiming for the best solution.
• Create a business case for change: as mentioned previously, analytics are a great way to convince stakeholders to agree to making those changes a lot quicker. Quantify will serve this purpose by providing you with the data and information you need to present to your relevant stakeholders in order to make that change happen.
• Calculate the cost of a service: if you are working with a client that is continuously asking for more or asking for something specifically, Quantify can help you quickly calculate how much that service should cost and how much you should charge the client for it.
• Understand your capacity: you may be looking to expand, or to make significant changes to your process. To do it successfully, you have to have an idea of what resources you have available. Quantify will help you understand your capacity and not exceed it, and adjust your changes according to it.  
• Explore different potential scenarios: this allows you to replicate your process for months or years at a time, so that you can see how that change would affect your potential ROI. If there is a wait time at any step, it may look smaller up close, but once expanded to a year, how much are you actually losing out on? Quantify allows you to see that instantly and thus make a more informed decision when it comes to improvements. And it allows you to see how it would change as well.

How Does Skore Quantify Work?

Utilising Quantify with Skore is extremely easy. It can be narrowed down to four key steps:

First, you want to map all of your processes in Skore. You can do this online, independently, or in real-time workshops. As Skore is a collaborative platform, everyone can contribute in their own time or in real-time. 

Thanks to its base being UPN, all of Skore’s notation is fully standardised, avoiding any misunderstandings which may arise by using other mapping software. This means everyone can contribute without the need for additional knowledge. 

Once you have all of your processes mapped in your process library, you can begin to add numerical information such as durations, direct costs, delays and people costs. With Skore, you can add as much information as is necessary to fully provide a realistic picture of what your processes look like. And it does not clutter your map one bit.

With the information added, Skore will begin running its initial analysis. You will find dashboards with all of the data you provided instantly and readily visible, showing the durations of your processes and potential bottlenecks. This will also help you understand costs and how successful you are at matching process activities to revenue. 

Finally, you can begin to explore and consider your options. Understand the impact your changes will have by exploring different scenarios. Once you’ve settled on the best one based on your current understanding of your capacity, you can create a business case to present to your shareholders.

If you’ve already mapped all of your processes and have been using Skore for a while, you can also utilise Quantify to continuously improve on your existing processes. Set up a process review to remind you to constantly check your analytics to study how your improvements are going, and to find new steps to improve as well.

Conclusion 

Business process improvement is measured most easily numerically. And the way to access those numbers?

Have your analytics reflect your processes.

Skore is unique in its offer of Quantify, which can speedily help you stay on top of the data on a continuous basis, a key component to achieve business process improvement.

Get in touch with our team to find out more!

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This blog was written by Joe Williams

In this series of blogs, we are looking at what rising costs could mean for the Retail industry in 2023 and share some useful tips on where you can begin to look for cost savings.

Rising costs are affecting retail businesses throughout their supply chain and operations. Mapping out and visualising an operating model for your retail business is a great way to investigate areas under a business’s direct control. However, costs and time are also accrued on your behalf outside of your organisation, through third-party suppliers. Getting visibility of your supply chain and how it operates can also allow you to spot improvement opportunities in areas of stock management, sustainability and delivery time. 

By investigating your supply chain you may be able to leverage better deals with your supply partners and achieve joint efficiencies in your operations. It may also give you a compelling reason to investigate potential new suppliers. Tidying up your supply chain will often create further stability, whilst also saving you money on the procurement of stock and/or supplies. For example, sourcing from local suppliers may now be more attractive, compared with larger international partners, due to higher shipping costs and taxes. Sourcing locally could also be a key differentiator as more people look for more sustainable retail alternatives.  

Look at Packaging Choices

The vast majority of retail businesses are now online and many have large shipping and packaging costs. Packaging is often an easier place to start. It is within your direct control and changes have a lesser effect on the main business operations. Materials and technology have moved on in recent years and there are now more sustainable and cheaper alternatives to plastic and bubble wrap. Don’t forget, however, to consider the type of packaging that your specific product(s) needs so they arrive safe and in perfect condition to the customer. Remember that first impressions and customer experience are vital to winning repeat business and customer loyalty in Retail. 

Shipping is an important part of most retail businesses. It is often outsourced to a national or international fulfilment partner. They can cover both shipping and warehousing costs in one single monthly payment. Customers shopping online now expect fast deliveries, so it is important to research and compare the speed, quality and cost of your shipping partner to their competitors. Visualising shipping operations is a useful way to understand the differences in lead times and feedback/support processes. By taking the time to review these simple aspects of your businesses you can not only make some easy changes but also discover some incredible opportunities for your organisation. And it shouldn’t be difficult to do. 

Use the Right Tools

Skore is a purpose-built process improvement platform. It is helping retail businesses map their supply chain and operations faster and in a format that everyone can understand. Sharing process maps with suppliers and third parties is easy within Skore, making collaboration around improvement opportunities much more efficient and effective.

If you’d like to chat about how Skore can help you map your supply chain, or just find out more about the platform please get in touch joe.williams@getskore.com