A well-streamlined business enjoys a lot of competitive leverage. They’ll have higher productivity and hence more revenue. Besides, they will be saving more time and resources that you can put to other use.
But inefficient business operations will waste your resources and time. Even the waiting time as you try to rectify errors can negatively impact the company. As such, it will reduce your production, quality, and financial performance.
Therefore, adopting strategies to improve your business efficiency should be a priority. Digital transformation is helping companies streamline operations using technology and has been on the rise after the pandemic.
Automation is at the forefront of this transformation. It allows machines to handle repetitive tasks faster and accurately with little or no human intervention. As a result, your business processes will run faster with little to no human intervention. So, it will eliminate human errors in your process for a smooth operation.
But before discussing the best ways of boosting efficiency in your business, let’s understand first what business efficiency is all about.
What is Business Efficiency?
Business efficiency is the capacity to maximize your output or production using labor, material, and capital inputs. Put plainly, it is how well you use your time and resources to get your desired results, including revenue.
Business efficiency can come in various forms – process, labor, energy, financial, etc.
5 Ways of Boosting Your Business Efficiency
- Automate Your Business Processes
Automating repetitive tasks frees your time and resources for other essential things. Also, it reduces your future costs on certain expenses like admin costs.
Administrative costs are one of the expenses draining companies’ revenues. The costs include employee benefits, security, overhead charges, etc. It may vary depending on the industry. For the insurance industry, there are additional expense items like:
- Policy admin and servicing
- Claims registration and processing
- Underwriting
- Regulatory compliance like US’s HIPAA and EU’s GDPR provisions safeguard patients and employees’ and employees’ sensitive private health information.
- Process and business analytics and much more.
Admin costs in insurance are a nightmare in US health care than in most western countries. For example, US insurers and providers spent over $800 billion on admin costs against about $3 trillion in national expenditure. That’s over 30% of national health expenditure on admin costs alone.
However, insurers in Canada only spend 17% on the same. That means Canadian insurers and providers are more efficient than their US counterparts. And the secret is repetitive process automation (RPA). So, automating repetitive processes like claims registration and processing saves you tons of admin costs.
But the systems you develop to automate the processes must align with your business objectives and regulatory compliance. Any slight mishap or system flaws can affect output and expose you to risks like fines from the EU’s GDPR.
Also, you need to check for system flaws and errors without interrupting your processes. That’s where the automated Guidewire testing tool comes in. It tests your automation projects to ensure they are safe, secure, and conform to your business objectives and regulatory compliance.
Automation is not restricted to the insurance industry alone. If you have repetitive tasks that can be automated, then go ahead. However, always get feedback from employees before and after automation. It will help you know the impact of your automation and which tasks to automate.
- Delegation and Consolidations of Tasks
As a business owner, better efficiency starts with you. It means you must know when and which tasks to delegate. As such, you can free up your time and re-focus on more essential tasks that need your absolute attention.
But before delegating, you must know your employees’ strengths and weaknesses. That allows you to delegate tasks to the right people who can handle them. With proper checks and balances, you can monitor the process at the initial beginning. You can relax control with time as your team becomes more effective with delegated tasks.
With time, the team can accomplish the roles better on their own. It makes them invested in the performance of the company.
Also, you can consolidate some tasks to enhance efficiency. You can start by looking for redundant steps in your business processes. Let’s assume two people are doing the related functions that one person can quickly handle.
- Nurture Open and In-Person Engagements
Another best way of tapping improvement ideas is through open communication. Open communication will encourage sharing of ideas between departments and employees. Your employees are part of your processes. So they are better placed to know what to streamline or not.
Plus, you can solve some issues quicker with in-person conversation instead of several threads of emails. Through a balance of in-person and online communication, you can optimize your efficiency for a better exchange of information.
- Avoid Disruptions
As mentioned earlier, even the time you’ll take to correct mistakes in your process wastes your time and affects production. As such, you should repair or improve your business processes with the least disruption to your operation.
That’s why most system updates for business processing systems happen at midnight when most customers are asleep. Well, that only applies if you’re a local or regional business. What if you’re a multinational? Midnight at your HQ may be midday in another regional operation center in another time zone.
Disruptions can also come in the form of numerous meetings. Streamline your employee meetings so they do not take up most of your productive time. Make them short and precise to help dedicate more time to production.
So limit the disruption to businesses as possible, and your efficiency will improve.
- Outsource Some Tasks
You can also scout for outsourcing opportunities to improve your efficiency. It will free up your internal team’s time, allowing them to handle tasks that match their skill set effectively.
And you can outsource almost every business function nowadays – from accounting to customer service. Leverage online freelancing platforms like Upwork or specialized outsourcing companies to handle some tasks. They can do so faster and cheaply, offering better efficiency and competitive leverage.
Final Thoughts
Staying competitive is hard enough; you don’t want to add business efficiency to the list. As such, you should always look for ways to improve your business efficiency. We have curated some of the best ways you can boost the efficiency of your business.
We emphasize automation because it has a better shot of scaling your efficiency to a new level. It will save you from future costs, increase speed and eliminate flaws in your processes. Other ways of advancing your business efficiency include delegation, task consolidation, outsourcing, and open communication.
Don’t lose revenues and competitive leverage because of the old and ineffective business processes. Change and streamline them to avoid being knocked out of the competition.