Working with Aciron: How We Elevate Business Process Functionality

Functionality refers to practical features and capabilities that make up a business process with a goal to make a process more efficient or convenient for the company and/or employee. This concept applies to essentially all departments and deliverables within a company. We’re talking product development, customer relationship management, auditing, staff management, and everything in between and beyond.

The goal we want to address is how can we recognize where bottle necks lie in your current processes and see how we can enhance the functionalities within the process through automating, adding, removing, or improving features.

When looking at the bigger picture of creating efficiencies, we must analyze the entire business process. This is the culmination of steps that guide a team through structured tasks and workflows to deliver a desired result.

For example, a B2C organization’s end goal may be to increase satisfied purchases. Processes that could be included are the product’s manufacturing, the marketing of the product, order fulfillment, and post purchase customer service.

These processes are an integral part of how your organization functions and are performed regularly to achieve your organization’s overall purpose. When looking at your business’s bottom line goal, you can then work backwards and identify all the processes that make up your workflows.

From there, you can identify bottlenecks – that is, where a process’ results are delayed – to discern what areas need to be improved.

The steps that make up a business process are the unique functionalities that allow the process to progress and ultimately reach the overarching goal.

For organizational efficiency it is important to look at each piece of functionality individually to identify the bottlenecks. From there you can then plan for improvements and choose who to contract out to help.

Real World Example

A direct-to-consumer brand needs to process and fulfill orders. Within these business processes there are multiple functionalities, like storing customer data in a database, printing shipping labels with the correct information, and packaging the products.

You might look at this practice and see where steps are lacking in efficiency, maybe an employee is manually inputting the customers’ information for the shipping label, when that could easily be an automated task allowing that employee more time to focus on other areas.

Overall, ensuring that you have a solid understanding of your business’ functionalities allows you to achieve goals in a more streamlined manner, while improving adaptability, productivity, and communication.