Business process consulting goes by several names, including process consultation, business process management (BPM) and others, but they essentially boil down to the same idea. In a nutshell, it’s about documenting and streamlining business processes so that organizations can improve processes and enhance the way they do business.
A business needs to understand and document its current processes—including the human and technological elements involved—in order to identify how they can be improved for maximum efficiency. Process consulting is a subset of organizational development that focuses on identifying and solving problems and improving business efficiency. When an organization is seeking to improve how it does business, it may hire an outside firm to provide process consulting.
At Tolar Systems, we provide process consulting services to our clients. The methodology we follow is slightly different than most other process consulting organizations. Here are the steps we follow:
Understand Goals: We work with the client to understand their business goals, or we may already be familiar with their business goals as part of a pre-existing relationship. This step is often skipped in process consulting, but we believe it’s crucial, since ultimately the reason processes exist is to support the goals of the business.
Determine Maturity: We also believe it’s critical to understand a business’s maturity level. We use the Predictable Success model to determine this and to provide a guide as to what types of processes will work best for each client. A startup, for instance, doesn’t need a complicated process. A large, established company may need a process that’s more rigorous than a less mature company.
Visioning Interviews: Through interviews with the client, Tolar Systems determines how the company wants to operate, envisioning the ideal business process with the client. Many consultants allow software selection to determine business processes, but we believe the business needs should determine the technology rather than the other way around.
Process Assessment: We also interview clients to determine how their business is currently operating. Process consultants interview and survey team members involved with the processes as well as your business leadership to understand how processes are currently operated and how they align with your business goals. The current baseline is documented and benchmarked, comparing current processes to best practices and standards related to your industry or technology requirements.
Solution Design and Delivery: Finally, we design and present the new solution. This solution could be a change to a process, a workflow alteration, or a technology update. Our process consultants design a solution to develop processes and provide tools to solve the identified issues. Often these solutions and tools will involve technology that can be deployed to streamline processes and enhance the way your organization does business.
Follow Up and Monitoring: Your business and its environment are always changing, so a one-and-done assessment process won’t deliver accurate results over the long term. Measuring results of the new processes and reassessing them for additional improvements is vital.
Process Consulting Outcomes
Process consulting offers an objective, data-driven methodology for driving better business decisions and improving your business’s efficiency. It can allow your organization to reduce costs and work more efficiently while reducing resource demands. It can also help your organization become more scalable and support growth.
Contact Tolar Systems today if you’d like to learn more about how we can help your organization leverage process consulting to align your business with today’s technology and enhance the way your organization functions.
