There are many benefits to standardizing your business processes. Whether you’re doing so as part of an ERP implementation or apart from technology, standardization can bring huge efficiency gains.
When employees across departments and locations are performing the same task in five different ways, it’s safe to say that at least one of these methods is egregiously inefficient.
Business process standardization involves identifying the best way to perform a process and implementing it across your organization. As you do this for various processes, you’ll find that you can minimize errors and redundancy while boosting efficiency.
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Why Standardize Your Business Processes?
Business process standardization and quality often go hand in hand. When every employee knows exactly how to produce the goods and services that keep your business afloat, then you mitigate risk and improve customer satisfaction.
Before going further, we wanted to mention that it’s possible to standardize a process across departments and locations, while rejecting the standard functionality your ERP vendor provides for that process. There are certain cases where this makes sense, and the below benefits still apply.
1. Enhance Scalability
As a business leader, you naturally want your company to weather all storms and grow over time. Part of achieving that longevity is ensuring operational stability and scalability.
When you standardize your business processes, you have a blueprint that tells employees exactly how a task should be completed. This blueprint is accessible and repeatable, eliminating guesswork and ambiguity.
If you have process ambiguity between departments and locations, you’ll struggle to scale your business quickly enough to meet increased customer demand. To do so, you’ll not only have to streamline your processes, but first, you’ll have to standardize them – both of which are time-consuming.
2. Improve the Customer Experience
Have you ever had a great slice of pizza at a new restaurant, only to return the next day, order the same thing, and find that it doesn’t taste the same? If so, then you know how important it is to get a good thing right, time and time again.
When all employees are following the same processes, then product quality and consistency understandably improve. This is because you’re reducing the amount of variability in your offerings, which improves the customer experiences and your overall brand image.
3. Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement
Great companies are born out of a culture of continuous improvement. This is a company environment in which everyone feels empowered to look for and share ways to improve their processes.
Standardization allows you to establish the basics first, so employees are speaking the same “language” when they collaborate across departments and locations to solve pain points in their processes.
4. Faster and Cheaper Implementation
Whether you currently have an ERP system in place or plan to implement one in the future, you know that automating your business processes can save you time, money, and sanity.
However, jumping right into automation without first focusing on business process management, can be a costly mistake.
We recommend improving and standardizing your processes before the implementation phase. Hourly implementation experts don’t come cheap, so you don’t want to waste their time with decisions you could have made in advance.
When it comes to the type of standardization that goes beyond internal standardization and you actually standardize your processes based on software functionality, standardization brings cost savings in other forms – you realize these cost savings because you have less need for software customization.
Essentially, when you standardize most of your processes based on your ERP system’s best practices, you don’t have to spend as much money accommodating processes that you’d like to perform differently than the industry standard.
Is Business Process Standardization Right For Your Company?
Business process standardization is ideal for any company that wants to deliver high-quality, consistent products and services with a high degree of predictability. Most executives would nod their heads and say that’s exactly their goal.
While the benefits of this approach are obvious, some companies may prefer to adopt a more flexible business model. This is usually the case with fast-growing companies who need to be able to adjust their operations at any given time.
Our ERP consulting company can clarify any confusion you might have regarding the term “standardization” because it can mean different things depending on the context. Within an ERP software implementation, it certainly has multiple meanings. Request a free consultation below to learn more.
