The American Society of Mechanical Engineers introduced Business Process Mapping in 1921. With countless applications for business, mapping business processes enables everyone on the team to see the process in the same way while increasing communication across the organization.

Steven Shapiro’s 7 R’s of process innovation include: Rethink, Reconfigure, Resequence, Relocate, Reduce, Reassign, and Retool.

The 7 steps to create business process improvement:

1. Decide what needs to change and what process can be done a better way.
2. Analyze the problem and understand the steps. Process mapping is a good way to do this, when you describe precisely the problems you are facing and why you’re able to take steps toward improvement.
3. Visualize a proper business process for your company. Be sure it is precise and simple.
4. Map the process. How does the process begin and end? What are the steps and the decision points? Who is involved in each step?
5. Analyze your process map. Can you eliminate any task? Is every step necessary?
6. Now draw a map as it should be.
7. Execute the improvements and run the new process (smartsheet blog).

One crucial tip to ensure success is to have people who work within the process take ownership of the process improvement strategy.

If you’ve attempted to improve your processes, but you haven’t seen the results you envisioned, Blackwood Impact Group can help.

With Blackwood Impact Group guiding your small business process improvements you can expect to:

• Reduce costs and increase profitability
• Improve communication between business sectors and among your team
• Deliver greater value to your customers
• Avoid reoccurring errors which hinder profitability and decrease customer satisfaction
• Guarantee that the product or service will be delivered efficiently and effectively

Stop doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. It’s time to offload tasks onto different employees and implement best practices for getting things done.