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Sometimes chaos is
necessary and useful – but not nearly as often as some people might think. When
you’re on deadline and it takes seven phonecalls to find out where your artwork
is, a little structure could make life a good deal more pleasant.
The mantra for business
process analysts is “simplify, standardise, automate” – but the benefits start
much earlier, with acknowledgement and appreciation of existing business
process. Sometimes marketers don’t think they have
processes: but understanding and
documenting what goes on when you create a new product, change a pack size or
commission artwork has several benefits. It helps teams understand each others’
work better, it’s invaluable for training and it can suggest immediate
improvements.
In most large organisations functions are
well-defined at the highest level, but underneath that things can get messy.
Which files move where, how quickly do they move, who needs to approve what –
getting down to this level of detail can deliver real value. One of the results is that it becomes much
clearer exactly who is responsible for any particular process, and who is
accountable for it. Quite often it turns out that two people are accountable, a
less-than-ideal situation which is easy to fix - once you know about it.
When we’re examining a client’s business
processes we also focus on who needs to be consulted at any point, and who
needs to be informed – again, this can expose communication gaps. Once we have
all this information, it’s possible to automate the process in such a way that
much of this needs no intervention – automatic notifications when particular
milestones are reached can be an invaluable project management tool.
Apart from the project management
advantages, there is also huge scope to save money by eliminating paper in as
many places as possible: digitising everything means no copying or courier
costs, just for starters, not to mention the saving in cost and effort that
comes from managing digital rather than paper assets.
Streamlining and automating marketing
processes through well-designed software systems can help eliminate mistakes as
well. Being first to market, especially with seasonal products, is very
important in the FMCG sector: and sometimes one mistake, like a wrong barcode, can
set you back days. One of our clients estimated that just two days of
Valentine’s sales were enough to pay for an entire process management system.
For marketing departments to get the most
value of process enhancements, a process management suite needs to be able to do
three major things. First, it needs to provide an effective digital assets
library and management; second, it must enable good management of products; and
finally, it needs to provide rich and effective project management tools. There
are plenty of products on the market which do one of these things, but the real
rewards come from linking them all together.
No business ever stands still, of course,
and a good process management system should also be designed for flexibility.
When a process changes, it should be easy for users to reconfigure the system
without calling in outside consultants.
Creative workers do need freedom to work
effectively. The good news is that implementing proper process management, far
from limiting that freedom, can extend it by eliminating time-wasting
bureaucracy. In one of our projects we discovered that a product acquired 500
separate bits of information in the journey from design through manufacturing
to transport and sale. Yet many of this separate bits were identical – barcodes
and reference numbers, for example, needed to be entered anew every time the
item moved to a new stage of the process. Eliminating this kind of duplication
by replacing all the paper forms with a single digital file brought the number
of fields down to just over 200 – which meant less time wasted, and fewer
opportunities to make mistakes. That in
turn meant more time to devote to the real creative work.
In any industry or profession that’s been
around for long enough, best practices develop and organisations who want to
win must understand and implement that best practice. Marketing is no
exception: for many companies, it presents one of the last opportunities to
wring competitive advantage out of business process optimisation.
Alan
Haefele is Senior Business Analyst for Jam
Warehouse UK
and has worked for customers including Tesco and Britvic.
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