Key business processes are the processes that have the biggest impact on your customers, employees, and bottom line. In short, your key processes answer the question: “How does our business generate value?” When you know your key business processes, you know exactly where to focus your investments and energy.
Today’s fast-paced business environment encourages employees to get more done in less time with fewer resources, making key processes more important than ever.
Typically, key processes are operational processes that fall within the following buckets:
- Develop vision and strategy
- Develop and manage products and services
- Market and sell products and services
- Deliver services
- Manage customer service
Each of the above aligns with process categories found in APQC’s Process Classification Framework (PCF)®. Identifying key processes requires digging into each category to understand where you have a competitive edge that you need to preserve as well as weak spots you need to improve.
Connecting Process to Strategy
Process teams have traditionally supported driving efficiencies in cost, cycle time, and throughput. However, according to our research over the last few years, process teams have begun to focus again on connecting process to the organization’s overall strategy, continuous improvement and process standardization.
The key processes are still important; but it’s also critical to understand how those key processes impact the organization’s overall strategy. It’s one thing to say, “We’re great at marketing.” Well, good for you, but how and why? Maybe you’re amazing at identifying market segments. Maybe you’re the cream of the crop when it comes to defining the customer value proposition. If you don’t know what makes you great, and how your greatness affects the bottom line, you won’t be able to replicate and build on your current successes.
Strategic alignment is a key tenet of process management and is foundational for an effective BPM program. Nearly half of respondents to APQC’s How Process Programs Stack Up survey (42%) said that supporting the execution of strategic initiatives was a primary area of focus for their organization’s process management work. When it comes to establishing your process management strategy, it’s essential to define the “why” before the “what.”
To create an effective strategy, follow these essential steps:
- Understand what constitutes effective strategic alignment for your organization.
- Identify and gather input from key stakeholders regarding possible targets for process work.
- Use value paths to prioritize key targets and measure the business impact of process efforts.
Understand Your Processes So You Can Improve Your Processes
You understand problems before you can solve them. Whether an organization wants to retain customers, improve cycle times, boost employee satisfaction, build more efficient processes, or any other goal, organizations engage in process management to improve something. But without a structured approach to improvement that includes foundational elements like measures of success and benchmarking, organizations risk making fragmented or random acts of improvement that may look good initially but are often unsustainable and even damaging to upstream and downstream processes.
Process frameworks like APQC’s PCF help organizations to hit the ground running with performance improvement efforts. Along with providing a reference model of the most common business processes, the PCF includes recommended measures and KPIs that help organizations select the best measures for process monitoring and benchmarking.
Learn more in APQC’s article, Applying a Process Framework: Performance Improvement.
Take Your Processes to the Next Level
The bottom line is that key business processes are not universal or set in stone. They are unique to your organization, so it’s up to you to figure them out. That’s why we’ve created numerous pieces of content and training to help organizations develop a structured approach for managing and improving processes in their organization. Get started today: