Are you doing the right things with the right number of people across the right organization areas while leveraging technology in the appropriate way in order to automate and streamline your business processes?

This is the basic question behind Business Process Optimization (BPO).  And it’s a mighty important question to ask – not just once, but on a continuous basis.

On the simple side of the equation, your business processes do two very important things.  They consume and they produce valuable resources.  Some processes generate revenues, others generate expenses, those in-between are responsible for producing yield – in terms of profit, income, working capital, efficiency, and productivity.

On the more complex side of the equation you’ve got many different factors to consider -- across the demand-chain, supply-chain, and the overall industry value-chain.

When thinking and practicing BPO, every aspect of the organization counts.  One must consider the business processes that touch the customer and place special emphasis on enhancing their experience.  There are always opportunities to identify and take advantage of unique ways to better collaborate with customers during the earlier stages of the relationship development process through on-going service and support.

Manufacturing and services companies should focus a keen eye towards looking at those business process steps that impact cycle times and quality.  The business processes need to be decomposed into their corresponding parts so that every event, every activity, every step along the way can be analyzed according to a process improvement programme that is designed to ‘get to optimized’.

One must think through how business processes can be optimized by:

• Understanding what the high-value, high-impact business processes are and how they ‘connect’ into and within the overall enterprise strategy;

• Understanding what aspects of the business processes influence or impact up-stream and down-stream business processes;

• Knowing the relationship between business process structure and the organization structure;

• Looking into the corporate culture to understand what real and artificial barriers are in the way that might cause BPO to fail – and more importantly, how to remove them;

• Looking across the industry value chain, and bringing a view into the demand and supply chains of the organization; and,

• Understanding how off-shoring and outsourcing can be leveraged in order to meet specific business performance targets and objectives.

Synthesis consultants have expertise in developing business process optimization programmes, modeling and designing business process flows, identifying opportunities to leverage best practice approaches across all process functions, and determining how technology can be used most effectively to realize specific business process optimization performance targets and objectives.

Synthesis works with your team to perform these functions with the intent to help your team to build up internal capacity so that you can realize the benefits of a continuous business process optimization effort.

We leverage our enterprise engineering software system, Synthesis Enterprise Designer, to collect all of the essential business process information so that sound decisions can be made with respect to changes and improvements.  We allow our clients to license this tool so that it can be used throughout the organization to collaborate around BPO (and our other practice areas).