SDM is short for system diagram method, and BPD stands for business process design.
If your current business processes don’t deliver a reliable and consistent experience for your customers, you may have a case of inefficient business processes on your hands.
In other words, you don’t have a clear picture of your current work steps to help you adapt quickly to your customers’ changing demands.
Unfortunately, it’s common -- which is why it is the second costly professional support problem that I want to dig into with you. Having a clear picture of the steps at your fingertips will give your business a huge advantage over your competition.
REASON #2: Lack of Professional Support Leads to Inefficient Business Process Design (BPD)
Well, here’s the reality:
The workers in a process have the most difficult time understanding how all the business activities of your company work together.
Workers don’t see how the activities impact customers, because they just focus on their part of the process. And, as a result, the company loses customers.
Many business owners forget that they have a responsibility to customers to meet or exceed their expectations. These expectations should be addressed in the BPD. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, said “Fixing customers’ problems builds loyalty with people”. Having a BPD that fixes customers problems will help you build customer loyalty.
SDM and BPD allows you to design business processes based on your customers’ needs, because they are used to show how work is accomplished in your business.
Customers’ needs constantly change. Creating a clear picture of your current work steps, known as a business process map, will help you to adapt more quickly to your customers’ changing demands.
Business process maps will:
Promote customer focus from initial customer contact through fulfillment of a customer’s need;
Promote easy decision-making to adjust quickly to changing customer demands;
Provide a shared view and understanding for staff training;
Help you identify problems in your current operations;
Reveal ways to increase efficiency of a process;
Reveal ways to save time and costs associated with activities;
Lead to improvements in a non-threatening manner to those who have to do the work; and
Clarify your business activities—a picture is worth a thousand words.
So, ask yourself the real question: “How can I afford not to have business process maps for my business operations?”
I admit, it does take a certain level of commitment in order to use SDM and BPD effectively – especially if you aren’t an accountant/auditor. You and/or your team can develop an effective BPD.
TAKE ACTION:
Make sure your business processes address these questions:
What are the step-by-step details of the process?
Who does what for a particular task?
How does the process flow from beginning to end?
Being able to adapt more quickly to your customers’ changing demands will give your business a huge advantage over your competition. Therefore, it becomes critical for you and your team to understand how all the activities of your company work together to produce a customer experience.
So now you know how and why SDM and BPD can help you and your workers focus on customer needs. Access our FREE Operations Starter Kit to begin designing your business processes based on your customers’ expectations.
But there’s another reason why lack of professional support is a common operational problem a business owner deals with. In Part 3 of this blog post, we will give you a tried-and-true strategy for bouncing back from wasted marketing dollars.
If you or your team has no prior BPD experience, then professional support will help to minimize the learning curve. Get professional support in Vendor Boot Camp©. Pre-register today.