Process Management and the Small Business

They call it BPM. It used to be called “systems management”. But the term “business systems” got corrupted, and the name changed for clarification. Business Process Management is nothing more than looking for repetitive task sets within a business, and developing a faster, more predictable process for making them more efficient.

BPM analyzes where the greatest time losses are occurring, and devises solutions to speed them up. Sometimes it involves software, sometimes training, sometimes better equipment, different office arrangement, etc.

You can do this in a small business, but you do it a bit differently, and the cost/benefit equations are somewhat different as well. It means looking at how YOU work, and making THAT more efficient. For a small business, standardized solutions may not work, especially if you are carving out a niche that is distinctly different than your competitors.

We realized early on that if we built websites like most designers, that we’d be losing money from the get-go, or we’d price ourselves out of our target market. Neither of those was an option.

Most designers start with a PhotoShop mock-up – a graphical representation of what the website will look like. Then after it has been approved and finalized with the client, they code it into the site.

We’ve built a few sites this way – sometimes it makes sense to do so. But mostly we don’t, because our clients cannot afford the extra hundreds of dollars that this kind of process requires. So we did it differently in order to make it more efficient and cost effective.

We design a header in PhotoShop, and the client approves that. We then discuss how we need the navigation to function. After that, we go straight to coding – of course, we don’t hand-code most sites, we start with a template that is functionally close to what we need. We install that, put in the header, change the colors and accents, tweak the CSS and we are done.

We recently built a design for a new client. We had a basic idea of what she wanted, and the colors she wanted. We were able to go from concept to approved design in about three days. If we had done it with a PhotoShop mockup, we’d still have been three days to the approvals, and then we’d still have had to code the design, which would have been another three to four hours of work to make the necessary changes. That’s a couple hundred dollars more that the client would have to pay, or that we’d lose. Not efficient. As it was, we finished the first portion of the contract in record time, and came out with a comfortable profit from the work.

We looked at what our target market needed. We then looked at the standard way of doing things, and at solutions for speeding that up. They were not sufficient, so we developed our own system for the process. It takes us through it in an organized way, and gets the job done quickly, but in a way that is still personal to the individual business owners.

A good business process can be streamlined in a way that suits your business, and your customers. It will keep the personal interaction that is most important, and systemize the parts that do not need to be personalized.

In our business, every single site install is the same. So we can automate and systemize parts of that.

Site design is personal. So we systemize that ONLY where it won’t affect the personalization of it.

Look at your own business. What are the things you are doing over and over again? How can you speed those up, what tools can you use to make it more efficient, cut out some of the headache, make the results more predictable, etc? And where is personal contact CRITICAL in your business? How will you build systems that protect that essential personal interaction with your customers?

Corporations put a lot of money into better Process Management. You can make many parts of your business flow more smoothly with just a little thought about how you do it, and by obtaining good tools that work for YOUR business. It doesn’t have to be a science of professional specialists. It can be used to benefit any business, at any stage.