Business process efficiency
Which business process can be considered effective? At a minimum, it should produce the result that was built into it. But the result can be achieved at different costs. Let’s look at several criteria for the effectiveness of business processes, they are also the causes of problems and subsequent optimization.:

Customer impact — An inefficient business process can harm the sales process. For example, if your customer has to wait too long, he may refuse to buy (even while already standing at the checkout) — we will get an increase in churn. A bad and annoying sales manager script or the rudeness of a support operator can significantly reduce your sales volume.

Cost — any process costs money, and if its cost is incommensurable with the result, this is a problem. In the process, there may be too long operations, unnecessary people, even unnecessary steps. An expanded circle of participants at meetings, most of whom are silent and stick to their phones. The requirements for matching each ticket with the information security. All this calls into question the effectiveness and meaning of such a process.

Resource utilization — disposal problems may not affect a specific business process, but they add to the losses of the company as a whole. For example, the downtime of developers may not affect the project budget, but it definitely increases the cost of the bench. And botlnecks, which indicate a lack of people at some stage, lead to overwork, fatigue and increased turnover, for which the company will pay again.

Opportunities for development — the world is changing, the company always has plans for development and business processes must support this. If the process architecture does not have some flexibility, then redoing it may be too expensive, and as a result, good strategic initiatives will simply remain on the table.

If you look at this whole list, you can see what unites them all. One way or another, all criteria for the effectiveness of a business process can be calculated in money. As well as the cost of implementing this optimization. I do not urge you to look everywhere only through the prism of money. But we must understand that money is a convenient general coordinate system in which decisions can be measured, including optimization of the business process.

Business process optimization methods
As I wrote above, there are no specific applied tools for optimizing business processes. They are all, in a certain sense, abstract. Roughly, all methods can be divided into 3 large groups:

Philosophies are sets of ideas, focuses, and value systems that will underpin the definition of effective business processes. These include Lean Production, Agile, Total Quality Management, 6 sigma, and similar frameworks.

Ready—made templates are libraries of specific process implementation options that can be taken and implemented out of the box. This includes the usual Scrum, Kanban, ITIL, ISO, and some Lean practices. The basic idea is that in a specific situation, you take a specific implementation and use it. Some improvements or adaptations of processes are not exactly prohibited, but they are not very welcome.

Ideas for inspiration are sets of checklists, typical process scenarios, and problem—finding methods that you can apply to your process and see potential points for optimization. Here I would include: Optimization patterns, 7 loss streams from Lean, Value Stream Mapping, Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints. The main disadvantage of these techniques is the lack of solutions. They show you how to find a problem, but how to solve it is a big question.

In addition to all these methods, as I wrote at the beginning, I want to propose an approach to evaluating efficiency and subsequent optimization through cost — through money. I would like to emphasize once again that this option does not negate all the previous ones, and can be combined with them. But it also provides a definite picture of the current state of the business process and opportunities for its improvement.