Process Improvement: Simplifying the Path

If you’ve survived the last five years with the recession and business stagnation, chances are you’ve already implemented, completed, or attempted several improvements to your business processes and have come to realize that continuous improvement is crucial to surviving in the current business environment.

You might now be at the point of knowing what you’d like your new process toprocess look like but be struggling with how to implement it. Improvements based solely on changes to manual processes are much easier to implement than those that require changes to automated systems. Yet in many cases, the big wins come from automating repetitive clerical tasks or augmenting knowledge worker tasks with automated support processes.

In many instances, “extending” the capabilities of your ERP or other operational system establishes the base of significantly reducing the clerical labor and providing the leverage you’d like to gain. The question is how to deal with the technology of your ERP.

What you might not have considered is combining outside eyes with in-house expertise to develop the tools you need to move to the next level. In teaming key members of your staff, who understand your current work flow and your business rules, with a partner, who has the analysis and development expertise to augment the capabilities of your existing system, you can often have the best of both worlds; the reliable backbone services provided by your ERP as well as custom capabilities for those few instances where your processes are not fully supported by your existing system.

 

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