Business Process Assessment
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Business Process Assessment
The business process assessment is a tool used to reveal business process improvement opportunities. Many times, companies have business process challenges that go undetected like termites invading the frame of a home. The termites proliferate and cause more and more damage as time goes on and you may not be aware until it is too late! It isn't until you get inside the walls to find that real irreparable damage has occurred. Just like it is important to have your home checked every so often for termite invasion it is important to have your business checked as well.
NVC has significant business process assessment with companies in a variety and business processes including:
Record to Report (R2R) is a Finance and Accounting (F&A) management process which involves collecting, processing and delivering relevant, timely and accurate information. It provides strategic, financial and operational feedback on how a business is performing.
Procure to Pay (P2P) is the process of requisitioning, purchasing, receiving, paying for and accounting for goods and services. It gets its name from the ordered sequence of procurement and financial processes, starting with the first steps of procuring a good or service to the final steps involved in paying for it.
Quote-to-Cash (or QTC or Q2C) is the end-to-end business processes on the sell side: Product (or Service) Configuration. Pricing. Quote creation for a prospect or customer or channel partner, and its negotiation.
Acquire-to-Retire (A2R) is a term describing the collection of processes a company has implemented between the acquisition of fixed assets and the disposition of these assets at the end of their usable lifetime for the company.
Plan to Produce (Pl2P) describes the process of producing goods which includes the initial production planning, the process of preparing the production, producing the goods, and the transaction made for the placement in the warehouse.
Lead-to-Opportunity (L2O) encapsulates all the activities that companies have to perform to attract leads, convert them into Opportunities and close those opportunities. Marketing Automation and Sales Automation are the two main streams that are adopted to optimize these processes.
NVC recommends the following steps to perform a Business Process Assessment.
- Create a business process project management committee by selecting one member from each department of your company so every part of your company is represented.
- Nominate a business process project management committee leader to manage the progress.
- Develop a comprehensive business process analysis document to measure and assess the existing business processes. This can be achieved by asking a series of questions applicable to the individual departments and assigning a weight to each question answered. The business process assessment can reveal "bottlenecks" within a department that are hindering the growth and efficiency of the business.
- Define your milestone and project projections. Prepare a project timeline.
- Compare your current IT, accounting functionality against your needs and business process assessments. Create a matrix comparing each business process need against the capable functionality of your internal personnel and accounting, human resource, customer-relationship-management systems.
- Prepare a simple checklist to visualize whether your business process challenges are human related, or software related.
- If the business process challenges are human related than it may just be a matter of training. If the challenges are software related and cannot be addressed with your current systems in place you may realize return-on-investment by replacing your dysfunctional software systems.
- Prepare a simple checklist request for proposal and submit it to the paired down list of vendors. It is important to keep this simple, some vendors will not fill out lengthy requests for proposals especially if there is an independent software consultant involved.
- Request product demonstrations. Invite the RFP respondents who checked off the requirements meeting your needs to demonstrate their ERP system, Human Resource system, Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management system etc.
If there are termites eating away at your business detect them and eliminate them before more damage is done! NVC has performed hundreds of business process assessments. Please contact us for more information.