In today’s fast-paced world, innovation and growth are key to business success, whether you are a start-up or a mature company – and a lot of this starts with improving business processes. Because of this, organisations must continually develop better ways to streamline operations to improve effectiveness, increase efficiencies and achieve greater productivity, while minimising human error. In this article, we’ll discuss how business process improvement plays an essential role in your organisation to achieve overarching success, and share actual case studies that we’ve workshopped for our clients.
What is Business Process Improvement?
In simple terms, business process improvement (BPI) is a practice where enterprise leaders analyse their business processes (such as those behind their Finance Department and Accounting functions) to identify areas where they can improve accuracy, effectiveness, accuracy and efficiency, and then make changes within these processes to benefit from these improvements.
An example of Business Process Improvement
Let’s say your eCommerce website sends every transaction to your team who then have to manually process it. This can be slow and increase the possibility of errors. Also, the job would be tedious and potentially overwhelming. So, BPI would analyse this, automate the steps and make the task behind every transaction happen in seconds.
How does Business Process Improvement work?
Business Process Improvement works by identifying the operations, employee skills or technologies that could be improved or added to create smoother procedures, more efficient workflows and overall business enhancements. Let’s show you some real case studies of Business Process Improvement that we’ve implemented for clients.
How Dexterous applies innovation to common business challenges
Part of what we do as a Managed Finance Service involves working with a lot of client processes. Unfortunately, these client processes aren’t always efficient. They often involve a lot of clunky processes and dated software – making their finance functions inefficient and ineffective. If we simply “adopted” these processes, we would also find ourselves hamstrung when trying to complete their finance tasks. So, instead, we proactively solve them.
At Dexterous, we believe in innovating
That’s why we bring together some of the best minds in the finance industry every few months to discuss client process bottlenecks and then collaborate to develop smart solutions. Once we have the right solution, we then implement them across all of our clients’ operations for the benefit of everyone. Here are four examples.
Scenario1
Our client from a Public Charity Institution had been using reports in PDF format for their payroll system which then created a mundane and tedious task to manually extract the details or convert the file and then paste it into a spreadsheet. The Dexterous Solution Through our innovative solutions, we came up with a system using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automatically extract all the information from a PDF file and upload it into their payroll system in seconds. Now, we use this system for every client who faces a similar PDF problem, saving hours of work and improving data entry accuracy at the same time.
Scenario 2
One of our clients in the building construction industry has been working with two systems: Xero and SimPro – the former being an accounting system while the latter is a job management system. While both of these platforms have tremendously helped this company simplify their business process, their team are still manually searching for order numbers in SimPro, and then manually uploading the attachment for that order number into Xero. The Dexterous Solution We activated the automation capabilities of their current platforms so they could seamlessly search for the order number, check and verify the corresponding details and then upload the attachment for the order number in just a click. This significantly reduces the workload for their Accountant, allowing them to focus more on important tasks. Our solution also minimised human error by removing the manual process of searching for order numbers and uploading attachments through automation.
Scenario 3
Many of our clients need business reports in several different formats, and so they typically get someone to convert these manually, which is time-consuming and inefficient. In this scenario, this client’s process involved numerous steps, took a lot of time and had a high risk of human error across all of the data conversions. The Dexterous Solution Through our innovative approach, we were able to automate the reformatting of their Trial Balance report directly from their Sage Accounting software platform and into the format required to upload onto their website. This not only saved over an hour per week’s worth of time uploading files into the platform, but this automation process is now being adapted to reformat many other reports issued from the Sage software.
Scenario 4
The current option for Xero-to-Xero invoicing only creates a draft invoice without any attachments. This means we had to download it and then manually append the PDF invoice, which is very time-consuming. We noticed that a ticket request to solve this was already submitted to the Xero Support Team. However, their team said that it was not currently possible to include attachments when sending invoices via a Xero-to-Xero network key. The Dexterous Solution Our expert team identified these limitations in Xero and came up with a better solution using RPA to automatically attach the invoice. This has now drastically lessened the workload of our Bookkeepers and Accountants by standardising the process of issuing invoices across all of our clients.
When we say we proactively identify and apply business process improvement initiatives, we mean it.
These case studies are just four of many examples of how we assess our clients’ processes and develop innovative ways to improve them.
Achieve business process improvement through your Dexterous managed finance service today
If you have manual or bespoke finance tasks that you want to be managed with greater accuracy and efficiency, or if you’re curious about how you can streamline these finance functions, our team is here for you. At Dexterous, we focus on identifying a practical solution that works for you through a financial, operating and growth lens. This means that we leverage all the latest tools including Robotic Process Automation (RPA), access global talent and manage your finance department with the local expertise of our Sydney team. Reach out to Dexterous and improve your business process today.
