Is 2019 the year where you really focus on tightening up and improving your business processes? But, how will you know if you’re making any headway or reaching your targets unless you make them tangible?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) provide your business with a measurable value so that you can keep track of your progress and ensure you meet your targets. Furthermore, KPIs can help to ensure that your BPM doesn’t fail, by continually finding areas of improvements. So, if you’re looking to improve business process management for your company, what are the KPIs that you need to put in place?
1. Average process time
A KPI that can do wonders for your business in the long-term is assessing the length of time taken to complete each process. Working out the average period of time to complete a process can be an excellent way of understanding the importance of deadlines and working out the ways to reduce the time taken for delivery. Working out the average process time can also help you to understand where the failure to meet deadlines lays. Furthermore, it can help you to work out and abide by service level agreements.
2. Average process step time
As well as measuring the time taken to complete a process, it is often worthwhile to delve deeper into the time taken to complete each process step. By measuring the average time to complete each step in a process, you can determine where the bottlenecks are that are slowing down the process time as a whole. It can be useful to look at other process steps that require very little time to see if you can apply the same measures to different actions.
3. Approval times
Many business processes rely on approvals, whether from senior management, customers or distributors. Approval times can be an invaluable KPI to measure the approval lag time which can determine the best ways to speed processes up for maximum efficiency.
4. Volume of transactions
For all business processes, it is essential to consider the number of transactions that are being put through business processes. The amount of transactions will help you to highlight whether methods are working well, or whether they are simply under less pressure.
5. Tasks per employee
KPIs are also an excellent way of determining the workload per employee so that the business can understand where additional support is needed and how to scale up the business effectively. The amount of task per employee can also be used as a short-term measure to determine bottlenecks and capacity.
6. Number of ongoing tasks
Another measure that can be effective to measure is the number of ongoing tasks. Again, measuring the number of ongoing tasks is a short-term measure but can help to provide an overview of the business as well as the efficiency relating to all aspects of business process management.
Of course, the right KPIs for your business will depend on the business activity and processes. While some may be effective in helping the company to achieve its goals, others may not be as effective. Try several out and work out which ones best suit your business process management.