BPI or business process improvement refers to a strategy or program that helps businesses update and/or re-structure their existing activities in order to improve on various fronts including operations, financial stability, brand value, and customer service among others. Business processes relate to all the activities that a company is doing in order to run their business from manufacturing, warehousing, goods delivery, store operations, back-office handling, and customer service. All these activities are part of any BPI implementation and companies basically strategize to eliminate problems in any process and promote improvement overall.
The usual first step in implementing BPI or business process improvement is to identify which part of an organization is causing problems or concerns. If there are various complaints regarding the delivery of goods for example, organizations may check their manufacturing process and their shipment process. The delay in goods delivery for example may be identified as due to manufacturing issues rather than on the shipment. Analyzing the concern in manufacturing and addressing it with new actions to be taken or implemented will then result to an enhancement of the existing process and contributing to the overall business process improvement strategy of the organization.
Coordination between employees and different teams or departments is very essential when implementing a BPI strategy. Some problems within an organization for example may stem from multiple processes rather than involve only one department. A customer complaint for example may not necessarily involve a company’s product team for example. The complaint may actually also involve problems with the product’s value, delivery, and function. With these concerns, other processes and departments may also be involved like those involved in quality checking and even customer service. Through business process improvement, the things that do not contribute to the company’s overall goal of efficiency will be eliminated and new practices may also be introduced to contribute to the same goal.
