Process excellence isn’t just about cutting costs — it’s about unlocking value across six critical business areas. This guide breaks down how financial performance, business agility, scalability, reliability, customer experience, and visibility work together to drive measurable results. Learn how to identify where process improvements will have the biggest impact on your business and get practical steps to start your process excellence journey.
In brief:
- Drive measurable business value through process excellence.
- Shift the focus from cost cutting to revenue acceleration.
- Build flexible processes and a resilient culture that adapts to change.
- Achieve real scalability by growing revenue faster than complexity.
- Standardize processes to make future changes easier, not harder.
- Recognize that internal process issues affect the customer experience.
- Capture real operational data to create a meaningful road map forward.
Process excellence, operational excellence, and business transformation programs all improve processes, which is a key part of delivering business value. And creating business value is at the heart of achieving, maintaining and enhancing process excellence in your business.
Before you can create that value, you should know what it is.
The most straightforward metric for determining business value is income — also known as the bottom line. But other components will significantly influence that bottom line, either directly or indirectly. In the broadest sense, business value includes everything about the business — including its strengths, weaknesses and problems — that directly impacts the business valuation.
In this vein, we encourage you to examine business value across six different areas beyond net income:
- Financial performance
- Business agility
- Scalability
- Reliability and predictability
- Customer experience and quality
- Visibility and transparency
Evaluating these details at the start of your process excellence journey will let you precisely track where your process efforts should focus. Along the way, you’ll have consistent metrics to show you where your efforts are driving results.
You can customize these elements for specific business needs (by combining two into one, splitting one into two, or renaming one, for example), but together they capture the underlying value drivers in your entire business.
There are several questions you should answer to provide a larger perspective for exploring how these factors help create business value — and process excellence as well.
Ask These Questions to Determine How These 6 Process Excellence Drivers Create Business Value
- What are the most common process pain points your business faces today? After companies have been in business for a while, they may encounter business pain points as they begin scaling up to meet growth objectives. These could be process control issues involving the original leadership team, a loss of innovative spirit as people become stagnant and averse to new approaches, or a lack of capital. These pain points compel businesses to find new funding streams.
- How do you measure process excellence return on investment (ROI) in the current market? Operational excellence is about improving processes and systems to boost efficiency, cut waste, and enhance quality and customer satisfaction. You need to measure operational excellence ROI to gauge the value created by your investments and process initiatives. Focus on metrics such as cost savings, sales, or revenue growth stemming from the improvements, as well as efficiency gains in time and productivity.
- What’s the difference between process excellence and digital transformation? Basically, successful digital transformation is built on process excellence. Your business may fail to fully realize the benefits of digital tools and technologies that power the transformation unless your processes are well-designed and efficient, contribute to business value creation, emphasize data-driven decision-making, encourage innovation, and have methodologies that promote a culture of improvement.
- How do you get leadership buy-in for process excellence investments? To get leadership buy-in for the process improvement initiatives that maintain and enhance process excellence, you must:
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- Inform leaders about project goals at the outset.
- Target the pain points or objectives that are leadership priorities.
- Present a plan to address potential hurdles.
- Present data-based evidence to show how your improvement plans have succeeded in similar industries.
- Pick the right pilot process for the improvement journey — one that clearly demonstrates its value.
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Now, let’s examine each of these six aspects more closely so you can determine the effect that process excellence can have on your business.
A Closer Look at the 6 Process Excellence Drivers
1. Financial Performance
Almost everyone wants to jump immediately to cost-cutting measures when they consider financial performance. Cost cutting is a key factor, but try looking at it from a revenue perspective instead. Using processes to grow or recognize revenue faster can yield strong financial results and a competitive advantage.
Take Shopify’s ecommerce platform, for example. They accelerated revenue growth by offering a user-friendly interface, a wide variety of customizable themes, and integrated payment solutions.
In recent years, numerous industries have seen significant value added by increasing customer onboarding and product development.
2. Business Agility
Your business must be able to rapidly adapt to market opportunities and threats cost-effectively and productively in order to survive in the short term and long term.
Processes with flexible technology platforms, such as business process management systems (BPMS) and rules engines, allow your company to quickly adapt pricing strategies, cash management, and other vital processes. These composable platforms break complicated systems into distinct, interchangeable modules. This means you can be more agile because your company can quickly build, alter and scale applications in response to changing requirements.
You can change out, refine, or reassemble modular components for specific business tasks (such as client administration, vendor onboarding, or payment processing) so you can readily import new features, modify workflows, and scale to a bigger user base.
Part of business agility is making sure your company supports continual process changes so the value you gain through a flexible technology platform is not negated by cumbersome processes for implementing change. You can do this through a change management plan, a comprehensive strategy that guides people and businesses through transitions.
More to the point: “You need a culture of agility, which ensures teams can embrace business transformations in real time,” says Hilary Lee, Centric Consulting’s national people and change practice lead.
A good example of this in practice is the Chicago-based Academic Health System. They successfully integrated two new organizations, each of which required the challenging deployment of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, because they had a solid change management plan. Their change management plan set expectations at the outset, engaged and educated key sponsors for the transition, and conducted several different readiness assessments during the integration.
3. Scalability
Think of scalability as growth without growing. Scalability can look like you grew your revenue by 40 percent when, in fact, you only grew ongoing expenses by five percent.
Scalability often becomes a primary focus during times of economic hardship or unpredictability. To efficiently grow operations and top-line revenue without adding expenses, you’ll need to strategically invest to increase enterprisewide efficiency.
Effective scalability happens when you design it through business models that enable growth without a big boost in operational costs. For instance, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies can serve thousands of customers at little incremental expense because the product is built once and can be extended to many users without further infrastructure investment.
Airbnb is a good example of a scalable business model. Rather than owning property, the company deployed technology to build a market that could scale worldwide without a significant increase in overhead costs. With a platform that uses automation, data analytics, and user-generated content to manage millions of listings and bookings, Airbnb can quickly move into new cities while keeping its operations efficient and flexible.
If your company has aggressive growth targets, you can proactively manage this growth without subsequently incurring the painful expense cuts that directly impact customers and employees when growth slows.
4. Reliability and Predictability
Consistent processes allow you to make changes to them more efficiently. That’s because you can change consistent processes much more easily than you can reconcile processes that are performed in multiple ways. Your process is consistent when it’s reliable and predictable.
Delivering predictable, repeatable, and consistent process performance is key to success in any industry, but especially in highly regulated industries like healthcare, financial services, and insurance.
An example of this is Amazon’s sophisticated logistics infrastructure with warehouses, transportation networks, fulfillment centers, and distribution hubs. They can handle huge volumes of orders with minimal delays — hence, people can depend on scheduled delivery. Because Amazon has a data-driven decision-making capability, they can establish consistent and reliable delivery times by predicting demand, managing inventory levels, and refining routes for the quickest point-to-point transit.
5. Customer Experience and Quality
You should always exceed customer expectations in terms of quality, customer service, and support. Focus your efforts on what customers actually see and experience versus what you think is happening with them.
One way to bridge that gap is by doing in-depth interviews, or IDIs, with a small but representative group of customers.
“Qualitative research like IDIs delivers a level of detail and customer understanding that helps you gain true empathy for your service or product users,” says experience design expert Colin McGee.
However much you try to hide or patch your processes, customers learn how you operate from the first time a salesperson reaches out to their final experience with your company.
To deliver exceptional customer experiences, you need to meet the customer’s higher-order needs, which are all about making emotional and psychological connections, and lower-order needs, which involve efficiency and problem-solving.
Empathy is one of those higher-order needs. It allows brands to understand and share what their customers feel. Zappos demonstrates it through their customer service: Their representatives can take however much time is necessary to help customers — to the point of engaging in long, friendly conversations.
Effort is one of those lower-order needs. In this context, effort means making it easy for customers to interact with brands. Netflix satisfies it with an intuitive platform interface, customized recommendations, and an autoplay feature that helps users quickly find the content they want.
You may wonder where the employee experience is in all of this. Think of your employees as customers of the process who expect a similarly positive experience. Involving employees in improvement efforts generally produces the best cross-functional ideas for improvement. It also reduces required work.
6. Visibility and Transparency
This is often the softest benefit, but we would argue it’s the most important. You will struggle to make informed improvements without data supporting your process. Metrics, service-level agreements, and escalation allow you to proactively correct and anticipate future issues.
You can make your processes and performance more visible on a small or large scale. A small-scale example we have seen is companies that conduct select processes through email. While that may seem convenient and cost-effective at first, it doesn’t provide insight into the true volume or impact of requests. It will also make it harder for you to track the timeliness and quality of responses.
A better alternative is an up-front investment that lets you capture the data you need to develop an improvement road map.
For example, The Christ Hospital Network in Cincinnati, Ohio, increased transparency and engagement for their patients by implementing a patient workflow system that afforded real-time visibility into patient progress.
They deployed tablets equipped with MyChart Bedside that patients could use to get care updates whenever they wanted, instead of when their care teams could take time to provide it to them. This empowered patients to have informed treatment discussions with their providers and saved time for nurses and other care team members.
How Do I Get Started with Process Excellence?
As you consider where to focus your efforts, start by defining how you will measure value in each area of your business, then find the right balance between these areas.
When you launch an improvement program or department, you’ll need to measure success. This will require a combination of hard and soft dollars to set the up-front standards and provide reinforcement once you realize the benefits. Your company may benefit from having a business process improvement or continuous process improvement department solely dedicated to increasing its business value.
Remember that individual projects need to have more specific goals — and just one primary impact area — to avoid undertaking too much change at once.
Making these six key business value drivers central to any improvement effort will enable you to think big, start small, and act quickly so you can clearly see the impact of your efforts.
[cta bg="blue" button="Get the Scorecard" link="https://centricconsulting.com/resources/ready-to-automate-the-best-processes-for-automation-identification-scorecard/"]A scorecard is a valuable tool to gauge the suitability of a process for automation, even with limited information available. We made a template to help.[/cta]
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