By: Jonathan Golland
As business leaders, how you prepare and respond to change is critical. Understanding your organization’s strengths and weaknesses enables you to make better decisions and position your teams for success. In today’s economic environment, aligning your operational objectives with your business strategy is even more critical. Identifying and mitigating gaps can positively impact your ability to execute that strategy.
So, where should you begin? First, identify your business objectives. The best way to determine if your current operations can support your business strategy is to clearly define your goals and then decide how your resources can help you obtain those objectives.
Once you have identified your business objectives, you must determine what changes, if any, are required for your organization to meet its goals. The organization’s people, processes, and technology are three common examination areas.
For example, if your business strategy is to grow – either by revenue, customers, or locations – can your existing finance and accounting operations support your growth plans?
These departments are often overlooked as part of an organization’s growth strategy because they are typically non-revenue-generating. However, an increasing volume of transactions, the number of customers, or geographies can significantly impact the roles, required knowledge, and processes performed by these resources. Understanding your people’s responsibilities and capacity to support the organization’s growth should be considered a critical input to your overall strategy.
A second factor to consider as part of your growth plans is whether current processes would operate effectively at scale. Many finance and accounting departments rely heavily on spreadsheets and other manual methods to interact with customers, process transactions, or execute financial reporting tasks. Identifying and resolving current state process challenges and pain points is critical to determining your ability to support your growth plans.
Lastly, understanding how technology can enable your business objectives is crucial. Not only does technology enhance your ability to process transactions, but it also can provide information for you to make better decisions. Are you utilizing your technology to its fullest extent? Information systems can provide “real-time” financial information such as key performance indicators (KPIs) and dashboards, enabling you to be proactive, rather than reactive, to unexpected performance variances or costs to keep your growth plans on track.
How Wiss Can Help
There are many business scenarios where understanding your organization’s strengths and weaknesses is applicable. Partnering with a trusted advisor offers a third-party perspective of your People, Processes, and Technology, which may be hard to uncover when deeply involved in day-to-day operations. Through one-on-one interactions, operational surveys, and review of existing processes and technology – Wiss helps you see the “forest through the trees.”
Wiss Advisory Services’ Business Process Review provides a deeper understanding of your People, Processes, and Technology and your organization’s preparedness to respond to the evolution of your business.
Our Approach to a Business Process Review combines industry and subject matter expertise to provide a holistic review of your organization. We partner with business leaders to understand your organization, assess current processes and technology, and provide an actionable roadmap to achieve your desired objectives.
We differentiate ourselves by delivering:
- A customized approach to your organization’s challenges
- Enhancement opportunities for you to focus your attention
- A prioritization matrix to help you determine where to begin
- A detailed roadmap with actionable steps toward resolving your pain points and challenges
- A high-level assessment of technology and systems supporting your operations
- A roles and responsibilities matrix to help you make informed personnel decisions
We welcome the opportunity to discuss how a Business Process review will benefit your organization and its business objectives.