Are Your Processes Inefficient?

The core of business operations lies in the practice of orchestrating an organizations’ unique combination of people, processes and technology. The failure to do this results in inefficient processes and problems such as delayed order fulfillment, dissatisfied customers, revenue loss, and lost market share. In fact, McKinsey reports that Order-to-Cash is one of the most complex processes, with a base that comprises one to three percent of revenue.

Cash flow is king, so why let SOBs (Surprises, Obstacles and Barriers) get in the way? When processes run smoothly, key operations become adaptive, efficient and effective.

Read on to discover potential points weakness that lead to inefficient processes and SOBs within an organization, and how Work-Relay can help eliminate these problems in the Order-to-Cash process.

Lack of Visibility

1. Processes managed via email
2. Too many ways a process is executed
3. No standardization and consistency in building processes
4. Processes and data are buried in spreadsheets
5. Undocumented or paperbound processes
6. Managers have no real-time visibility into roles and responsibilities
7. No operational system of record to provide the basis for common metrics and dashboards
8. No visual timeline for processes
9. Complex process and process step dependencies are hard to visualize
10. No audit trail of work done
11. No way to filter and see all the steps for active process instances in one place
12. No way to see the critical path of a process

Lack of Productivity and Efficiency

Process Dysfunction

1. Lack of standardization and consistency in process building
2. Inconsistent process execution
3. Ill-defined or poorly designed processes
4. Overcomplicated processes
5. Siloed processes
6. Inefficient, complicated, ill-designed processes
7. Team members forget to do a process step or do them out of sequence
8. Process exceptions cause workers to fall back on email and spreadsheets
9. No one owns the process
10. Poorly defined or misunderstood process output
11. Unable to assign tasks to queues, resource pools, groups, or the content of data fields

Knowledge Deficiency

1. No single source of truth for shared data
2. Information needed to complete the task is not readily available
3. Lack of a common collaboration medium
4. Confusion about job roles and responsibilities
5. Experts are overloaded, where the expert in an activity must answer the same question over and over
6. Too many places to find out what tasks to do
7. Inability to provide just-in-time knowledge, instructions, and tools to users responsible for completing a step (e.g. instructions, wizards, videos, checklists, etc.)
8. There is no way for users to update knowledge in the course of doing their work

Excessive Lag Time

1. Incomplete handoffs
2. Details fall through the cracks
3. Gaps in the workflow from one step to another result in wasted time searching for information and potentially inconsistent information between steps
4. Email overload due to lack of status visibility
5. User-difficulty determining the next step or course of action
6. Steps are marked as complete despite not meeting all deliverable requirements
7. Tasks languish forgotten about in email boxes
8. Process steps do not include automated reminders and escalation rules
9. Users cannot “complete and forget” – once they have completed a step, they don’t need to inform the next person in the process to start their task
10. Workers lack visibility into the status of work performed by others that impact them
11. Poorly-defined or misunderstood deliverables
12. Workers have no way to view all their tasks in one place
13. Lack of ability to include vendors, customers and partners in processes
14. Non-constrained resources have no slack time available

Excessive Work Time

1. A single task requires multiple applications to complete
2. Duplication of effort
3. Collaboration without context
4. Shifting priorities cause excessive multitasking
5. Poorly defined step prerequisites
6. Work starts with incomplete prerequisites
7. Excessive time spent on scheduling and rescheduling
8. Frequent and lengthy status meetings
9. Lack of focus on completing tasks on the critical path Inability to build and maintain multi-page and nested form, using multiple data sources, and dynamic hide/show fields, and calculations – without code

Lack of Automation

1. Lack of automated compliance with rules and regulations
2. Inability to collect status and notify others of potential issues via automation

Optimization Obstacles

1. Processes cannot be measured
2. Inability to find bottlenecks
3. Lack of focus on the most constrained resources
4. No way to answer questions like:
   • How long does a process typically take to complete?
   • What are the min/max/average times for completing process steps?
5. Impossible to turn past executions of processes that were updated in-flight into new or improved processes

Lack of Agility

Process Limitations

1. Disconnected processes prevent the ability to quickly adapt to changes
2. Rigid processes lack flexibility
3. End-to-end processes cannot be composed on the fly
4. Inability to adapt processes to changing requirements and circumstances
5. Processes cannot be maintained independently so as not to impact process instances already in-flight
6. Difficulty creating and managing multiple versions of processes

Worker Limitations

1. Workers cannot proactively accept, decline, reassign, or add tasks based on their workload
2. Workers cannot spawn new tasks or issues and assign them to others in the context of a step
3. Workers cannot skip steps, restart process branches, insert ad hoc steps, or add sub-processes in-flight
4. Workers cannot lock a process from moving forward until a checklist item or task related to a step has been completed

Complexity

1. Too many platforms and tools
2. Complex tools and platforms
3. Changes create more problems and exponential delays

The Order-to-Cash (O2C) cycle is an essential operational process to an organization. Moreover, how the process runs provides insights to an organization’s overall efficiency. Eliminating Order-to-Cash problems can recover lost revenue and increase overall efficiency, while providing your teams the tools they need to succeed.

Work-Relay provides a unique order-to-cash solution by removing the inefficient processes and coordinating time-sensitive, repetitive, and complex projects. And because Work-Relay is natively built on the Salesforce platform, organizations can seamlessly add Work-Relay to improve and accelerate end-to-end order-to-cash operations.