Data-driven tips: reducing process deviations

In today's labor market, staff shortages are forcing many companies to do more with fewer work hours. But how do you achieve this? Reducing process deviations is one of the most impactful ways to make your company more efficient. Data Strategy Leader Louis de Roo explains why this is the case in the second blog on the data-driven tips for 2023.

Operational processes

Your operational processes are the lifeblood of your company. This is where you make your product, sell your goods, or manage your inventory. There's a good chance you've thought carefully about how to carry out these processes as efficiently and profitably as possible, with the best result for your customer and for your company. During the onboarding of new employees, you explain how you expect them to work according to these processes, and you may even carry out checks and audits to make sure they're followed. So far, so good…. Or is it?

There's an exception to every rule, and a workaround for every process. In many operational processes, workarounds arise because the process doesn't meet certain needs of the people carrying it out. Excessive administrative burden, cumbersome rules, or a poor fit with the practical situation give rise to so-called "desire paths" that offer the user a faster route to achieving the desired result, skipping one or more process steps along the way. In other cases, exceptions to your process are actually created as a complication — because your process doesn't meet certain needs, or doesn't allow your user to achieve the desired result. In this case we speak of a detour.

New route

Of course, ideally you'd want your original process to be followed, since that was, after all, the most efficient route. But before you go all out to fight these workarounds, it's worth remembering that practice is stubborn, and that most of your employees usually aren't waiting for solutions that make their work harder. There may well be a reason for your workarounds!

Before you call out your employees for lax behavior, it's therefore a good idea to check whether they may have found a smarter solution. Anyone who's confronted daily in practice with certain problems eventually develops their own way of dealing with those problems, and with the knowledge you have now, that new route might actually be more efficient than the original process. In that case, it's wise to embrace the new route as the new standard as quickly as possible, and applaud this innovation. By promoting the new process, you've become more efficient in an organic way.

Not every deviation is an improvement

Unfortunately, of course, not every deviation is actually an improvement. In many cases, you'll see that workarounds to your process actually make the process less efficient or profitable. Here, it's important to realize that you're probably the one causing this yourself. Because what KPIs are you steering your employees by? Based on what figures are they assessed and valued? There's a good chance that somewhere in your management, one of the goals your employees need to achieve is the cause of a detour in your process. Because if the optimal process doesn't contribute to raising that one important score for your employees, they'll look for a way that does.

Another important cause of deviations in your process can also lie in how meaningful certain steps feel. Nobody likes doing meaningless work, and the process steps that don't represent clear value to the user are often the first to be skipped. Do you still consider those steps important? Then consider automating them with a simple low-code application. By adding a small piece of functionality, you can easily remove a lot of frustration, and still get the desired result without having to constantly chase after it.

Clear picture

So it's important not only to look closely at your processes, but also to have a clear picture of the management tools you use to steer your organization. In an ideal situation, you therefore not only have the right KPIs in use, but also know how and where they connect to your process, and how your system landscape supports this. By regularly checking whether your process still matches the needs of your organization, you ensure constant optimization, and, even more importantly: you make use of the practical experience of your employees to improve your processes.

Having a clear picture of your actual processes is therefore essential in order to be able to steer and optimize your organization. But that can — depending on the size of your organization — become quite a complex undertaking. Especially when you consider that you wouldn't just want a picture of your processes, but also of the exceptions to them. We'll soon tell you more about the use of smart software to help you with this.

Written by Louis de Roo
Data Strategy Leader
E-mergo