Category: Blog

Are you ready to move on from pen and paper or basic diagramming tools?

Fed up with overly complicated process languages and confusing symbols?

Ready to make the plunge into business process mapping software?

You’re probably shopping around right now, learning about all the different software available in the market right now.

More than anyone else, we’re your best fit.

Don’t believe us?

Here are five reasons why Skore should be top of your business process mapping software list.

Use of UPN 

Skore is based on UPN, Universal Process Notation.

Unlike other forms of notation for business mapping, such as BPMN, it does not require extensive study. It also focuses on keeping the maps simple and legible while presenting all aspects of a process. There are no concessions made like there are in Swim Lane diagrams, for example.

UPN is easy to understand and for all company members, regardless of the level of expertise or knowledge, to follow. The process documentation becomes standardised easily, as the maps made with UPN ensure everyone in the company has the same understanding, avoiding misinterpretation entirely.

This makes it possible to reuse the same material to train new hires and keep the organisational architecture and training aligned with the company goals. And when the time comes to review processes for improvement, they can be easily accessed and understood via the process library.

Furthermore, CRM giant Salesforce has recently recognised the growing trend of analysts and companies relying on UPN to map their processes. On their online-training platform, Trailhead, under the Business Process Mapping course, there is now a module on UPN. UPN is what the future looks like for process mapping. 

With Skore, you’ll be ahead of the curve compared to your competitors.

You’ll be able to communicate clearly with both stakeholders and frontline workers about what your processes currently look like, what you want them to look like, and how you envision getting there. And everyone involved will be able to understand how it should play out.

Faster Business Process Mapping 

Traditionally, business process mapping workshops were complicated and time-consuming events that few employees wanted to attend. Everything was written with pen and paper, and that information took forever to compile in a way that made sense to then work on.

Keeping it all up to date after the fact as processes and documentation changed was even more difficult as information would go missing or employees would move on.

And after a workshop was over or when any change needed to be made to a process, getting sign-off from stakeholders would take weeks of chasing after them.

Thanks to the adoption of UPN, business process mapping has never been faster with Skore as your tool.

Mapping during workshops can be done remotely or in person, and it is considerably faster to create diagrams. As Skore is intuitive and built expressly for mapping, you also do not have to dedicate time to creating shapes or connectors. The tool already knows to do it for you. You can map your processes at the speed of conversation. 

Sign-off from stakeholders can happen during the meeting, you can quickly create new processes or alternative processes to test out, and you can save all of them for future use or revisit. 

Nothing is lost due to time or inattentiveness during the workshop, and you’re mapping faster than ever.

Subprocesses 

Skore has the feature of creating a subprocess within a process.

What does this mean, and how does it look?

Essentially, in a What box (which answers the question of what action is being taken at this point), you can link to the previous process required for that box to exist. 

For example, in our sample customer onboarding template, there is an arrow-down button on the Perform initial setup box. Clicking on that takes us to the subprocess required to complete that action, which is mostly compiling customer data. This subprocess has all the same notations and format as a regular process.

While this step isn’t necessarily vital information in the first onboarding map we saw, it is still important to include it in the final result. Adding it as a subprocess allows businesses to truly drill down to detail without the map becoming crowded. You can still fit your high-level process map on one page. 

With Skore, businesses are able to have all the appropriate process steps and information accessible and visible without causing major confusion to anyone studying the map. 

Process maps become easy for high-level C-suite conversations to follow along and make big decisions as needed, as all process details can be accessed and viewed instantly. If anyone needs any further information, you can quickly drill down as required. 

Analytics

Another aspect Skore offers is the integrated analytics that helps you figure out how and where to improve your existing, mapped processes.

One of the goals of business process mapping is to improve or optimise your existing business.

You can find places where you can be more efficient or cut costs. Find tasks that are redundant and are being duplicated by other departments or even tasks that can be removed, so your employees can dedicate themselves to other, more worthwhile pursuits.

Taking the time to go over your processes and find the spots for improvement or optimisation is vital for any healthy business.

The problem is the length of time these discussions can take, and the decisions that come after. These tend to be the meat of the argument when it comes time to actually act.

So, how can you make this key part of process improvement go a bit faster?

By relying on numbers and having a tool that helps you see them clearly.

Enter Skore’s analytics.

By inputting your information and data into the software and with a simple click of your mouse, the analytical dashboards are created. They will make your process improvement or optimisation decisions a lot faster. 

And you’re not just relying on your gut instinct or the experience of your subject-matter experts – you’re relying on hard data and numbers. Which provides you with a much stronger business case to present to stakeholders. 

In this, Skore is also unique, as the instant analytic functionality we have and offer our customers cannot be found with any other business improvement software.

Roles and Responsibilities 

Finally, at Skore we focus on clarity and simplicity when it comes to mapping out activities.

This extends to who is in charge of each activity.

Process documentation and the types of diagrams associated have not often given much room or emphasis to roles, responsibilities, and their associated accountabilities.

This is a big problem and a mistake: if you don’t know which role is responsible for what action in your process, you do not know to whom you can ask questions.

We place this focus on roles and their titles, as well as including a list of responsibilities associated with that role, and not on individuals. 

Relying on individuals is risky, as employees will leave companies, and then take that knowledge with them. The last thing you want to do as a company is hiring someone back as an external contractor simply to go over how they made something run after they’ve left.

With Skore, it becomes clear what role is responsible for what, meaning accountability is clear. 

It’s much more effective at moving projects along as you can determine which role is directly responsible for each step of the process. There can’t be any internal disputes about who needs to meet the deadline when the associated role is there in black and white!

Work levels can also be reported clearly with analytics tools, which is instrumental when it comes time to studying processes for improvement, as we saw above.

Additionally, having roles responsible for certain tasks helps you understand how the process works in that instance. You have a clear title to ask questions when you’re first starting to map out the process, or when you start looking into improvement or optimisation.

Conclusion 

The above are only the top five reasons to switch or use Skore when it comes to business process mapping software.

We’ve been looking to the future with a focus on user experience since our inception.

Being early adopters of UPN, refocusing on roles and responsibilities, focusing on mapping quickly to ensure efficiency, and providing innovation to clients in the form of subprocesses and analytics.

The truth is, there is no other tool out there in the market like us.

So if you’re serious about taking the reins of your business and its processes, it’s time to have a call.

Get in touch, and our team will be happy to walk you through everything you need!

There is no shortage of challenges the food and beverage industry faces today.

Challenges that come with rising industry costs and a more complicated world following a global pandemic.

Food and beverage companies need to look at their existing processes to find ways to improve and optimise them if they want to spend less.

How will that help?

Let’s take a look.

Challenges in the Food and Beverage Industry

There are five distinct challenges in the food and beverage industry that organisations have to grapple with:

Rising Costs

Between a worldwide pandemic and a war, inflation is on the rise: food has increased by 15%. 

Restaurants and food and beverage companies have faced huge losses as a result of both, and food prices have increased dramatically. 

Between the effect of both worldwide catastrophes, the additional challenges on this list and the ever-changing environmental and climate condition, costs are increasing across the board. 

Organisations in this industry are struggling to keep up, and are starting to tighten their grip on their spending.

External Supply Chain Issues

As with the above, the pandemic, the war, and climate change have had an enduring impact on supply chains around the world. After all, Russia and Ukraine provided nearly 30% of the world’s barley and wheat.

During the pandemic, between panic buyers stockpiling food and workers not being able to go to work, supply chains around the world ground to a halt. While they are starting to recover, the amount of lean waste generated during this time is still being calculated. 

Not to mention the ever-growing concern with cargo theft, which can cost businesses over 30 billion per year. And even if they recover their cargo, laws prohibit recovered food from being sold. So companies spend more on security to protect their cargo while also spending on moving it.

Labour Shortage

On top of the external issues affecting the industry, it is also one of the most affected by the Great Resignation.

Not only are companies in the food and beverage industry losing key support staff and operations, but also important company knowledge. As workers move on from their positions, they take with them everything they learned while working for the company.

Unless that knowledge has been retained, the most recent process is thus lost to company leadership.

This slows down existing processes as remaining workers and leaders have to re-learn the process themselves, and it slows down training as you cannot justify hiring new workers until you know how to train them.

Changing Customer Preferences and Expectations

At the same time, customer preferences and expectations are undergoing a major shift.

Modern buyers are a lot more in tune with their choices and their impact on themselves and the world around them. People are reading food labels, taking note of whether companies match their beliefs, whether the packaging is recyclable, and whether the products are made with renewable energy.

Interest in healthier options and more varied international cuisine in an interconnected world requires food and beverage companies to be creative, resourceful, and mindful of customer tastes and interests, all of which have an additional cost at the moment. But it may well cost these companies a lot more in the future if they begin to lose customers.

Quality Control and Compliance

And finally, they have to adhere to some of the strictest rules and regulations out there.

As food is something all humans require and can directly impact our health, the laws surrounding quality control and compliance leave no wiggle room. They are enforced quite strictly with regular audits to ensure the organisation is acting accordingly and respecting the ever-changing requirements of both the government and the public when it comes to health and sustainability.

An additional cost for companies, those that do not find ways to adapt quickly and not bleed out money will be unlikely to make it through the next few years.

Which begs the question – how is the food and beverage industry navigate these challenges?

The answer lies in process improvement.

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The Role of Process Improvement in the Food and Beverage Industry

Business process improvement and business process optimisation is the practice of visualising the way your business is run and finding spots where you can make changes for the better.

In both instances, you are looking to make your business run more efficiently, and cutting costs or reducing practices that will negatively affect this.

It is through studying their business processes that folks in the food and beverage industry can overcome the challenges they are currently facing.

Let’s look at the labour shortage.

In the UK, especially post-Brexit, there is a shortage of workers in this field. Business owners and farmers can map out their hiring process over time, and find spots that are overcomplicating the process. For instance, depending on the role, multiple interviews or a take-home assignment are probably unnecessary, thereby cutting your hiring window. 

Additionally, you can compare how much it is costing you to post on different job boards and reduce costs by focusing only on the few that do provide you with candidates.

When it comes to retention, process maps help you retain company knowledge about how things are done. Workers will always move on, but knowledge management of your business processes must be maintained in order to hire and successfully train new workers, avoid any significant slowdowns during employee turnover, and optimise your workforce even further. After all, by retaining your process knowledge, over time you find spots to improve and start doing more with less as you increase your efficiency. 

In terms of the supply chain issues, you can map out how goods are delivered as a process, and then begin to research spots or ways to reduce costs. Reducing wait times, sourcing from alternative places, and hiring security teams for a longer stretch of time are all steps you can take that will help you keep costs down in the long run.

When you seek alternative sourcing locations you can also keep in mind your consumer’s mindset and interests. Perhaps focusing on more ethical options will be more expensive at first, but pay itself out with higher consumer demand. Or it might even be more cost-effective from the very beginning, as it will also help you keep up with the quality control and compliance the industry requires.

Visualizing how your processes are running helps you find these spots where you can make a change to improve your processes’ efficiency while simultaneously helping you cut costs. If you do not have a clear idea of how your business is being run, inflation will continue to grow and eventually you won’t be able to keep up.

Understanding how your business is currently functioning has never been more important for the food and beverage industry.

But how can you go about improving your processes?

How Skore Helps Reduce Costs

Our Skore platform was designed specifically with business process improvement in mind.

Not only are you able to map out your processes in a clear, simple view, but you can retain information and knowledge for all workers thanks to our process libraries. It is also an entirely collaborative experience, simplified so that every person involved with a process, from stakeholders to front-line workers, can add and follow along during a workshop. 

Its user focus also makes creating processes during a workshop faster than ever. And due to our standardised notation, everyone will be on the same page when it comes to meaning. No miscommunications happen when relying on Skore.

Thanks to how easy it is to map processes through Skore, finding those improvement spots has become as easy as pie. Not only can data be added, visualized, and drilled down for multi-level processes, but Skore also has a unique data analysis dashboard that provides succinct information quickly to users.

Through the data it is given, Skore’s Quantify Module specifically helps users analyse costs, systems, time, roles, compliance and quality checks, and process risks as they have been mapped. It will then help pinpoint the bottlenecks that result in your process slowing down and costing you precious time.

The module also provides the possibility to model and see what your changes may impact before you take that step. After all, adding a step may cancel out the cost reduction you were imagining. On the other hand, it can be used for making a case for spending on technology or automation that will make you more efficient, as it will calculate how spending on this will save you money in the future.

Other ways the module helps is by calculating the cost of services such as accounting to see if it makes sense to have it at the existing budget. Understanding capacity and calculating whether it is possible to make a change at this particular moment, exploring potential future scenarios and how they may impact your costs and revenue.

Our clients at Skore have seen significant success with our tool when it comes to improving processes and thus cutting costs.

From gaining a week’s worth of time off work back to expanding their business at the appropriate scale without overspending, they have met their organisational needs without compromising their budget.

We’d love to help the food and beverage industry do the same.

Conclusion

It is a challenging time to be a leader in the food and beverage industry.

There are significant hurdles to overcome due to the last few years, and it will not be easy.

The best way to respond to these problems right now is to take control of your business and understand how it is running. From there, you will be able to find places to improve your processes, run a more efficient ship, and cut costs while increasing revenue opportunities in the future.

All you have to do is set up a call with our team and we’d be glad to show you how.

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This blog was written by Joe Williams

In this series of blogs, we are looking at what rising costs could mean for the retail industry in 2023 and sharing some useful tips on where you can begin to look for cost savings in your organisation.

Let’s start with the most important part of any business – your people. Having staff and paying for their time is often the most costly part of running any business. The retail sector is no different in that respect and with it being typically the biggest cost, it’s often a great place to start and look for savings. We know that technology has made our lives move faster and we are all more connected. Retail businesses can also do more to leverage the advantages that technology and automation can provide.

Getting the most from your staff’s time and making them as efficient as possible within their roles, can generate huge savings and also increase employee satisfaction. Employees may have specific manual tasks, often short and simple in nature that they just ‘get on with’ and do regularly. But these simple manual tasks can quickly add up over time and may be a good opportunity to introduce a form of technology and/or automation. 

This is a chance for you to look at your processes. If you’ve mapped out your processes as we discussed in our previous blog, take some time to think back to your process map here. Ask yourself – What triggers them to do this task? Could that trigger be inputted into a piece of technology that would then automate the activity? What would be generated as a handover back to the employee? And even – is this task even really necessary?

Most employees get into strong working habits and may not see the bigger savings that automating these simple tasks could bring. By allowing technology to complete simple and repeatable tasks, it frees up the time for the employee to focus on stronger value add activities, such as providing great customer service. Using technology and more specifically the automation of tasks by a machine, can also reduce the risk of human error and speed up business activities. Making your business appear more reliable and easier to deal with.

It is essential to take into consideration the need for quality products and customer service when looking for automation opportunities. Some tasks may be too complex, varied or simply better done with a human-to-human interaction. 

Most of us will recognise that Digital Transformation has been a key buzzword in the retail industry for many years and relates to the use of digital experiences for both colleagues and customers. It’s an expression used to describe a multitude of digital projects across organisations, but in this case, we are referring to the following.

‘How a customer’s shop has changed due to technology and so how retail businesses should operate.’

Innovative technologies such as ERP systems, touchscreen kiosks, barcode scanners and even artificial intelligence and mobile apps are all worthwhile exploring for your retail business. However, all of these technologies demand proper consideration and implementation, to be successful. Again, when looking at implementing any technology system or automation, it is useful to understand the effect it will have. Where is the return on investment? How will it interact with people and customers? All of these and many more are valid questions that can be answered through process mapping and analysis. 

Skore is a purpose-built process improvement platform. It is helping retail businesses to better understand their process and how their own or third-party systems and technologies relate. With Skore you can easily run reports on how systems are used and create to-be process maps that show the value that any new technology and/or automation project could bring.

If you’d like to chat about how Skore can help you assess the impact of technology, or just find out more about the platform please get in touch [email protected] 

One of the most sought-after results when process mapping is cost optimisation.

And the way to arrive at lower costs is by identifying lead waste that is unnecessary for your business to run properly.

In this article, we’ll:

• Go over what lean waste is
• Learn why it is important to identify lean waste 
• Show you how Skore will help you identify it in your business processes, so you can optimise costs and improve your processes

Let’s get started!

What Is Lean Waste 

Let’s start with the basics: what do we mean when we say “lean waste”?

Based on the lean manufacturing management philosophy, lean waste refers to any in your business process action that does not provide value to the customer. Put another way, it is any action in your process that is not paid for by your customer, so there is no value to it.

It comes from the Toyota Production System (TPS) devised by Toyota’s Chief of Engineering, Dr. Taiichi Ohno. The focus was on eliminating waste within their manufacturing system, though it can be applied to other industries as well. 

There are seven different kinds of waste under this ideology, though an eighth waste was included in the 1990s after this ideology was adopted in the West. They are:

• Transport – This covers the movement of people, tools, inventory, equipment, or products farther than necessary. Excessive movement can lead to damage or defects, unnecessary work, greater wear and tear, and exhaustion. For example, sourcing materials needed for production should be near the location of the factory where they are utilized. Adding travel time will only slow down the entire process.
• Inventory – Specifically, excess inventory. Having too many certain products that are not being sold can lead to defects, damaged materials, longer production processes, inefficient allocation of capital, and problems being hidden away in inventory. It makes it difficult to detect problems in production, as defects can accumulate before they are noticed. This leads to greater problems down the line as products have to be re-made to correct these defects, while the original ones sit as excess inventory taking up space. Examples of excess inventory can be anything from unused records to additional products, to older machines that are no longer used but are taking up space. 
• Motion – Similar to transport, motion is any unnecessary movement of people, equipment, or machinery. But in this case, it is any walking, lifting, bending, reaching, stretching, or moving that is required but does not serve the customer. Tasks that require too much motion need to be re-designed, not only for efficiency but also to increase health and safety levels in the work environment.
• Waiting – As the title implies, waiting is any moment in a business manufacturing process in which someone is waiting for another action to be completed. The mishandling of this dead space can have catastrophic results if it is not managed correctly, so shortening wait times are always of the utmost importance. Examples include customers waiting to receive their product, waiting to receive email responses, and waiting on materials to arrive at a factory.
• Overproduction – A cause of excess inventory, overproduction is when a particular product is manufactured before it is asked for or required. It is better to aim for “just in time” as opposed to “just in case” when it comes to manufacturing. After all, overproduction leads to excess inventory, higher storage costs, hidden defects and higher costs overall as new products have to be made regardless. Some examples of overproduction include making extra copies, excessive reports that go unread, making more products than customers demand, or in higher batches. 
• Over-processing – More work, components, or steps than needed to complete the product or service required by a customer. Essentially, what are the actions in your process that do not have a clear connection to the money the customer spent on your product or service? A few examples of over-processing are utilizing higher quality equipment than necessary, running more analysis than needed, preparing more detailed reports than needed, and unnecessary steps in purchasing such as too many signatures on a document.
• Defects – Whenever your product or service is not fit for use. This means reworking or scrapping it, which are not real solutions. After all, both add additional costs to your operation without delivering any value to the customer. There is no clear line between their purchase and the costs you take on in this case. An example is a product that is missing a part or that is the wrong colour.
• Skills – The new, eighth waste added to the philosophy is under-utilized skills and talent. It can also be thought of as the waste of human potential. It happens when organisations separate management from employees too strongly. Not involving employees in the organisation and management of the activities they perform daily is a mistake, and results in a lack of knowledge and expertise from the frontline needed to improve processes. The way this plays out is usually a lack of training, poor incentives, not asking for feedback, or providing employees with the wrong tools for the job.

Why It Is Important For My Company to Identify Lean Waste 

Now that we know what lean wastes refer to, it is possible to infer why being able to identify lean waste in your business processes is important. In a nutshell:

If you do not identify lean waste, your costs add up without evening out by payment from your customers. 

By spotting the places in your business process where you can reduce spending and save instead, you save money while running your business more efficiently. And this will please your customers a lot more as well.

During times of economic uncertainty, it is of the utmost importance for organisations to be able to identify their lean waste. It is only by doing so and improving their processes accordingly that they will be able to save money and optimise without compromising the quality of their offer.

Attempting to identify lean waste without process mapping will only lead to rash decision-making that will have a negative impact at some point. 

But how does a process map help you identify lean waste?

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How Skore as a Process Mapping Software Identifies Lean Waste 

The first thing to do is invest in good process mapping software. While there are alternatives available, Skore should be your first choice.

Our tool is intended specifically for process mapping, and it can be easily used interactively during a workshop or for mapping independently in an asynchronous schedule.

Our use of Universal Process Notation (UPN) also makes it easy for everyone to follow along, from stakeholders to employees. This means frontline workers can easily provide key insights into what they do every day and how they solve problems they come across at the moment. 

Based on this, owners can work on specific processes and steps that correspond to those problems, removing complications such as excessive forms or waiting periods for certain materials. This helps reduce the costs of activities. 

The tool itself also suggests spots for improvement. By following these suggestions and changing processes, businesses will soon find themselves spending less and making more.

For a close-up look at how Skore works specifically to identify lean waste, you can take a look here at our lean webinar event.

Need some more convincing?

We’ve helped companies reduce activity times by an entire week, as well as shave 80 days worth of waste from their processes!

You can read even more success stories from happy customers to help convince you of the impact Skore can have on your business as soon as you begin using it.

At the end of the day, our focus is on helping all of our clients obtain clarity and direction of where their business currently is. How it works and why it works the way it does, and where it can be improved upon to spend less and make more. 

And we want to help you do the same.

Conclusion

Tools such as Skore exist for the sole purpose of helping businesses improve their processes and reduce lean waste in the twenty-first century.

It is no longer necessary to depend on pencil and paper to map your processes. With Skore, you can understand your business and how it is run, and communicate it to others in a quick, clean, and detailed visualization.

The eighth wastes of lean won’t know what hit them when you optimise and improve your processes.

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This blog was written by Joe Williams

You don’t have to look very hard to find a wide range of worrying news articles, across the world about how consumers are tightening their spending amidst the rising cost of living. 

In this series of blogs I’ll look at what this could mean for the Retail industry in 2023 and offer useful tips on where you should begin to look for cost savings within your organisation.

Firstly we should say that it’s not all doom and gloom. The U.K Retail Industry body, The British Retail Consortium, has some hope for later in 2023 and into 2024, when it expects to see a bounce back in sales. Nevertheless, in the meantime, times are hard for many retailers.

In each of the blogs in this series, I’ll focus on one particular area of a retail business operation where cost savings are often made. This will include a range of areas such as technology and automation, supply chain, packaging, staff turnover and knowledge management.

Firstly it is important to remember that operating a retail business often incurs a large number of expenses. These costs can quickly mount up, so we must understand what is essential to running the business and where you can start to make some savings. These costs are often referred to as operating expenditures (Opex) and include fixed costs such as rent, salaries, stock, shipping and packaging. 

It’s a real challenge to lower your Opex in Retail, without affecting your product quality or customer service. A good approach is to understand and map out the business’s operating model, from start to finish and beyond. This will give you a detailed understanding of where time and costs are spent and ensure that no areas are overlooked. 

The first step to any improvement to your business is to understand the status quo. ‘How are we doing things right now?’ 

It is often a powerful activity to create a visualisation of your entire business (AKA a process map). A process map can help to identify starting points for analysis and it has the ability to create a mutual understanding of ‘how things are done right now’. Just by simply doing this exercise, you may find some rapid and easy-to-fix cost savings, or perhaps it will discover unnecessary complexity, weighing down your operations. 

Using a specialist process improvement system like Skore allows you to input specific data on systems, roles, costs and much more, directly to each activity. With Skore you have the power to pull out this data into key reports that make it easier to spot the opportunities for improvement. You can also do future state modelling in Skore and test these improvements out, before making the final decision.

Spending some time to understand your business better could generate major benefits to your organisation, as well as some quick wins. I’ll explore further solutions in greater detail in the following blogs in this series. In the meantime, if you’d like to chat about how Skore can help you generate cost savings or just find out more about the platform please get in touch: [email protected] 

Process maps exist to help businesses optimise, reduce costs, and improve their existing models.

As such, you want your process map to be as close to perfect as possible. To fully capture how your business handles that particular process.

In this article, we’ll discuss the five critical steps to creating that perfect process map with Skore.

Step 1: Title and Scope

At the start of any mapping session, regardless of if it’s a workshop with multiple participants, or you’re mapping in isolation, you want to make sure you have a specific process in mind. This is why the title is so important. This way you avoid mixing processes that do not fit together, and you realise if you need to create a subprocess or widen the scope.

The scope can change throughout the session or as you begin to map, but the focus should always be on the title of the process. By having it as the title, you can avoid diverging too much into the territory of other processes or processes that are not your current focus or the focus of the session.

You treat it as your north star and remember that you always have to finish this specific process in mind, and everything discussed must match this. 

An example can be your payroll process. 

Initially, you begin by focusing on how to ensure your employees get paid. But then you run into extenuating circumstances such as leaves of absence or holidays, and you need to create additions to your process or subprocesses to reflect these deviations as well. Otherwise, you will be caught unawares when the time comes.

But everything still corresponds to the overall goal of payroll and ensuring employees are paid.

Without having this set and agreed upon from the very beginning, your session, whether in a group or on your own, will not achieve the overall goal you expected.

Step 2: Activities

Having set the title and scope of the process, it is time to go over the associated activities. By this, we mean the work or steps done in the process to ensure it happens.

With Skore, activities are captured in What boxes. A What box answers the question: what is happening in this step?

The idea with our tool is to start by placing a few boxes on your page. When you do this, Skore itself will begin to ask in each box: what happens here?

We believe starting the canvas with activities makes sense as it involves everyone in the mapping right away.

As humans, we are always happy to share what we do on a daily basis to contribute to the overall goal of the process. And it gets everyone involved and invested in mapping the process to achieve this goal right away.

Remember, activities are always described in the now. It reflects the immediacy and constancy of how the process is being run, and how everyone is currently contributing to it.

Step 3: Outputs

The third step is the outputs of these activities.

Outputs are the outcomes of the What boxes. They can be deliverables or the reason the activity is happening in the first place.

In a workshop, this will typically slow the conversation down a bit. It is easy to describe what you do on a daily basis. It is harder to begin to think about how what you do contributes to the goal of the process and what happens as a result of you completing an activity. Most importantly, answering why they do the activity they do becomes challenging.

Questions to consider asking during the workshop in this step are:

You’ve told me what you do, how do you know when it is finished? 

What is the outcome? 

Do you deliver a document, a report, that signifies it is finished and that the process moves into the next activity?

This step is as challenging as it is important. It is during this step that improvement opportunities really begin to show.

Challenging your team to understand and explain how what they do contributes to the goal of the process takes time. And it makes everyone truly begin to consider how it might be improved.

Say a member from the customer service department goes over how they onboard new customers. One of the activities they do is complete a form themselves during a call with the customer and independently. During the workshop, members of the sales team reveal that they also send the customer the form to complete. The form is necessary to add them to your customer roster, but doing it three times is taking up precious time for both yourself and your new customer. And it probably comes across as disorganised.

You ask your team, what is the purpose of the form. The answer is to upload them to your customer database, so accounting can invoice them. 

Then you review where you can improve the process. First, you should remove the form from the sales team’s responsibilities. Then, allow the customer service team to decide between themselves. Having a call with your new customer and filling it out together to then hand it over to the accounting department is probably best. 

But sometimes, a customer may need to do this asynchronously due to personal schedules. You can account for this as well by sending out the form for customers to complete independently if needed. 

And, you should only have one form per customer, as opposed to three.

In this way, you’ve improved upon your existing process and received precious time back. Time your sales team can focus on finding new customers and your customer service and accounting teams no longer have to track multiple forms.

Remember, just because this step may take longer, it is no less important. The importance of this step is highlighted in the challenge it presents to your team.

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Step 4: Flow & Who Does It?

The fourth step relates to revisiting the process and ensuring that it is in order based on the conversations that took place in the previous step.

You are essentially playing lost and found. Going back through the process is when your team will begin to point out steps or outcomes that were missed. Or where larger steps begin to be broken down into smaller ones, leading to the creation of subprocesses.

In the above example of the form related to Customer Onboarding, a step that may be missed is the creation and quarterly, or yearly, update of the form based on Accounting’s needs. The Sales and Customer Service teams may take the form for granted, but someone must be responsible for creating the blank version that must be filled in.

This activity will come to light while revisiting and reframing the overall process. It can be added to the map as a subprocess that doesn’t affect the visualisation of the overall Customer Onboarding process map.

As you revisit the process, it is also time to answer the question: who is in charge of each activity?

This assigns responsibility visibly to each activity. It becomes easy to track who is responsible for what, and who should be contacted in the case of questions or confusion. Skore will ask you directly which role is responsible for it,  being built into our tool: you’ll never forget to include it.

And, focusing on role assignments instead of the names of individuals means it is the knowledge that you keep as a business in your process library. This way when folks move on, you do not forget who is responsible for what, or what the activity that they were responsible for is.

Step 5: What Else?

The final step depends on the context of the process, but here you should attach additional information required for the process.

It is here that supporting information or documents are attached to the different What boxes. In the customer onboarding example we have been using, the accounting form would be one such document.

This step is also when you can capture improvement opportunities. 

In the onboarding example, there were a few outcomes we arrived at for improvement. One was having two possible activities for form completion, either via a call with the customer or sending it to the customer directly. During a process mapping session, you would make note of the two possibilities. You can add the two possible activities to your map, either as a subprocess or as additional documentation for the activity. In this way, you account for both possibilities having the same outcome, capturing the flexible solution arrived at during the workshop.

It is also a good opportunity to embellish and tidy up the process overall, ensuring it reads nicely and cleanly for all parties involved. 

Conclusion

Ready to make the perfect process map and optimise your business?

Taking your organisation to the next level and doing so successfully is all about knowing how you’re handling your processes.

And as we saw, with Skore, this is easier than ever before. Get in touch to apply these five steps and make the perfect process map for your business with Skore!

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It’s a new year, and this means there will be the new trends to watch for. Especially in our space -business process improvement. 

Our industry has grown substantially in the last decade, thanks to the impact of technology and software on what had previously been a discipline wholly reliant on pen and paper. 

But things are different now, and it is never more evident to us than at the beginning of a new year.

So without further ado, here are the top 10 trends we foresee for business process improvement in 2023:

1. Process Mapping Software

If your business hasn’t adopted process mapping software yet, this will be the year you want to.

It’s time to finally move away from pen and paper and embrace process mapping with software created specifically for this purpose. 

Not only will this adoption make it easier to map at the moment during a workshop, but also to share with all relevant parties in your organisation. You can rest assured you will all be on the same page and there’s no need to dig up old paper from filing cabinets.

There are several options to choose from, but we are a bit biased and believe you should give us a chance first. Here’s a look at how easy it is to build a process map with Skore.

Whenever you’re ready, you can get in touch. We’ll be glad to help you take your business processes to the next level this year. 

2. Simple Is Best 

It’s one of our founding tenets here at Skore.

Business process maps should not be confusing, hard to follow webs of steps and people. They should be easy to understand and as simple as possible while capturing how the process works.

Modeling methods such as flowcharts, swimlanes or BPMN failed to account for this need for simplicity. Instead, they complicated the entire process and then removed parts of the process in a bid for more space.

A cleaner, simpler approach will become favoured this year. 

3. Use of UPN

With the focus on simplifying process mapping, Universal Process Notation (UPN) will become the preferred notation style. 

At Skore, we’ve been using it since the get-go.

This is because UPN is easy to understand and adapt for everyone, without the need for certifications or the drawbacks of modeling styles that do not fit the needs of businesses today. 

A key indicator that UPN is likely to become even bigger this year?

CRM giant Salesforce has an online-training platform known as Trailhead. And its Business Process Mapping course now includes a module on UPN.

4. Cloud-based solutions

As we move into software instead of pen and paper, the focus will be on cloud-based solutions.

This ensures that all process maps are available to relevant employees on a constant basis. It also fosters the collaborative environment needed for process maps to truly capture what is taking place on a daily basis.

Cloud-based solutions such as Skore ensure all involved parties can constantly check in on and edit process maps as required, whether asynchronously or over a virtual call.

And you don’t need to root through old papers and files to find the map every time.

5. More People Involved

There will be more people involved in your processes and your process maps.

With the focus on simplifying process mapping and process management, more and more employees will be able to participate. 

While you will continue to work with external consultants, your own employees will also be able to contribute directly to your process maps. They will also contribute to the upkeep of the process, as they can now understand how they fit into the overall company goal and metric.

It will become far more likely this year for employees to be more directly involved, and for stakeholders to understand the process and everyone’s role better than ever before.

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6. Better Process Analytics 

Using technology will lead to better process analytics this year, which will lead to process improvement skyrocketing if you adjust correctly.

Process mapping software such as Skore has insight and analytics elements which allow you to draw clear conclusions about spots for improvement. You will no longer be going in blind and trying different things to see what will make the change.

The decisions will be well-informed and suggested to you based on the information you already have.

7. Building Process Libraries 

A trend we encourage organisations to jump on is building their own process library.

Skore and other software that have this feature are fundamental for you to grow as a business. Without process libraries, you will be constantly in the dark.

Process information will be lost, and you will have to start the whole mapping process all over again from the beginning, every time.

With process libraries, you retain organisational knowledge and build a strong foundation from which you can improve. It becomes accessible for all relevant employees to refer to at any point should questions arise.

And you have training material ready any time for new hires to study.

Creating a process library isn’t hard, as daunting as it might seem to map every single business process you have. Tools such as Skore make it easy and simple to do so over workshops or remotely, and then you have all the information for posterity.

8. Automation 

Automation tools will be adopted more and more this year to lessen the burden of daily, monotonous tasks on employees. From connecting with folks on LinkedIn to responding to queries on email or social media, automation tools will continue to rise.

Employees will be able to focus on work more worth their time, such as building and maintaining relationships with clients, while resting easy knowing that additional tasks are being completed.

Finding the areas in the process that will benefit from automation tools will still be the purview of humans, though analytics tools will have helpful suggestions.

The next step for automation in 2023? AI and RPA.

9. Use of AI and RPA 

Our AI capabilities will continue to grow in 2023. And we will make use of them.

AI will be adopted to help analytics tools and software identify patterns and areas of improvement in business processes. And Robotic Process Automation (RPA) will continue to take on certain business process components on.

Able to emulate human actions, RPA is the level-up of the automation tool that serves one single purpose. They understand what is on a screen, navigate systems, identify and extract data and perform defined actions. And they can do it faster and more consistently than humans!

Manual labour and tasks that do not require human involvement will slowly continue to be assigned to automation tools that will make everyone’s lives easier. And the way to find the places where these tools will fit in properly will be by process mapping.

10. Mobile Solutions 

We’ve adopted process mapping to specific software and made it cloud-based, so the obvious next step is to offer mobile solutions.

Likely to grow in popularity as 25% of professionals are expected to be remote workers by the end of the year, mobile solutions mean being able to work on process maps from a device that goes in your pocket.

With a focus on simplicity for process mapping, there is nothing more simple than being able to access and edit maps on your phone.

To do this, the software you use has to be focused on being simple, easy to understand, and adjustable. Mobile solutions are the culmination of all the above trends and growing changes in process mapping over the last decade, so we expect them to truly begin to have an impact this year.

Your Top 10 for Business Process Improvement….

The year has just begun, but we already know it will be a big one for process improvement.

There are many changes on the horizon, from Salesforce’s adoption of UPN to the move towards RPA for daily tasks. Changes that having the correct business process improvement software will be crucial.

Skore has been ahead of the curve when it comes to business process improvement trends since we began, and you can rest assured we’ll continue on this path for many years to come.

If this is the year you want to take on your businesses’ process maps with a focus on improvement, please get in touch.

We’ll be glad to help you increase your efficiency, productivity, and revenue in 2023.

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Legal Industry Trends of 2023

This post was written by Adam Harbon

As we’ve already discussed in my previous blog, according to a legal industry trends report from Clio, three of the top challenges Legal firms will face in 2023 are:

• Lawyers experiencing the “Great Resignation” trend.
• The increased adoption of remote work, providing flexibility but also causing work-life balance issues.
• The impact of inflation and a potential recession.

In the second blog of this legal mini series, I am exploring challenge number two indicated within the Clio Report: The increased adoption of remote work within the legal industry.

Skore looks for the opportunities for Process Optimisation within legal firms but additionally there are even more incredible benefits. Read on to learn more about how implementing a dynamic, insightful and engaging process platform is a way to ensure a productive, sustainable remote working model that could save you money.

Interestingly the CEO of LinkedIn recently posted the following:

‘Before Covid ~1% of jobs were remote. Today, its ~14%. BUT.. 50% of all job applications on LinkedIn, were for those 15% of remote jobs.’

What more evidence do we need that people want to work from home?

To ensure a productive work from home environment however we need to develop a relationship where we provide the correct processes to support that. This demand for a better work\life balance isn’t about to go away. So how do you, as an organisation, embrace it, source the best people to do the job and continue to achieve company objectives in a timely and effective manner?  

Last week I spoke with a Head of Legal Technology Operations at a top tier legal firm in the UK. He explained to me that they are struggling with process adoption for remote workers. The current state at this firm was they had a multitude of disparate platforms used for process capture and delivery (MS Visio, Excel, Lucid Charts, Process Documentation within Word). Remote workers struggled to find and access the correct and most updated version of a process to carry out their day to day activities thus impacting productivity and efficiency.

The Head of Legal Technology Operations went on to say that remote workers are currently spending a minimum of 5% (2 hours) of their week just looking for the correct process to follow. Just take a moment to consider the impact of this loss of hours…

The average UK solicitor salary is £62,000 (source: Law Society).  Lets take a look at a legal firm of 500 and assume 20% of the employees are lawyers and 50% of them work from home.

Average costings of a Lawyer

• Annual Cost: £62,000.00
• Weekly Cost: £1,192.30
• Hourly Cost: £29.80

Hourly cost x 2 (5% of the working week) = £59.60

50 remote workers = weekly cost of poorly accessible process: £2,980.00.  

This weekly cost across 52 weeks a year equates to: £154,960.00!

In fact this same process challenge is also faced by office workers, you should also add another cost of £154,960.00 for the 50 remaining lawyers who are office based. 

Therefore the cost of poor process just for 100 lawyers within a 500 employee legal firm is: £309,920.00 per year. 

This cost model does not take into account the remaining 400 employees who will also be suffering from poor processes or the loss of time it takes to ask colleagues for help. In addition we haven’t even considered the implications of someone not following the right process: Compliance Issues, HR Problems or even Decreased Customer Satisfaction. 

So how do you solve this issue, easily and rapidly?

Skore addresses this challenge by implementing a universally understood process standard: UPN and a centralised easy to access process improvement platform. UPN is designed so everyone in your organisation can read and understand your processes whether you are in the office or at home. There is no confusion or misinterpretation and the information you need is at your fingertips. It’s a no brainer. 

The question is, as a legal firm, can you really afford not to implement a standardised process improvement platform? 

If you’d like to know more about how Skore is helping legal firms or for a summary of the potential you could recognise from implementing Skore – get in touch. I’d love your feedback either way so please comment or contact me at: [email protected] 

One of the best investments you can make as an organisation is to create a process library.

Historically, processes were difficult to keep track of and hard to keep up to date as the company evolved. Fortunately, due to the advent of technology, this has completely changed.

It is now possible to keep track of your processes, and this is the help you need to bring order to your chaos.

Let us show you what this means.

What Is a Process Library 

A process library is simply a repository of all your mapped processes.

Your business is run on them.

A business process refers to the series of steps your business takes to accomplish a certain goal. When they work well, these actions should reflect the revenue you receive.

It is not enough to simply have the steps written down as a checklist or existing in your employee’s brains as parts of tasks they do daily.

Processes need to be mapped for businesses to truly flourish. 

If you do not map your processes, you do not understand how your business is run. And if you do not understand how your business is running, you do not know where it is that you may be overspending or losing out on money. 

We’ve had clients that were losing an entire week of work on activities. Once they mapped out processes and utilised Skore as a tool, they gained back precious time and resources to dedicate to their clients.

Had they not taken the time to map out their processes, they would not have figured it out.

Process maps serve to visualise how your company is working. They help you identify places to improve. This can include realising you are missing certain documentation, or that you have a lot of redundant forms. You can also discover that you can source materials closer, giving you a lot more time as a company to dedicate to other tasks.

These are the type of realisations that come from mapping processes.

A process map can take many forms and utilise many notations, but the end goal is always to help you optimise your business and achieve operational excellence.

If you take the time to map out your processes as they currently exist and then continuously check that they reflect the reality of your business, you will begin to practice continuous improvement. Your business continues to grow steadily and efficiently thanks to having them mapped out.

And you’ll compile all of these processes for constant review and update in your process library.

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Why Does My Company Need a Process Library 

In the past, mapping processes was a time-consuming, complicated process that involved sticky notes, pen, and paper.

Having your processes mapped and in one place typically meant filing cabinets or papers that were lost after a very long workshop session. It was a headache to think about where you could keep your maps safe to come back to. More often than not, they were lost or forgotten about. They would have to be remade because by the time anyone looked at them again they were so out of date.

When businesses originally began to map processes, this would be done in long, tedious workshops involving all employees, from stakeholders to front-line workers. Because companies seek to understand exactly how all parts of their business function, they involve all relevant workers involved in a particular process, from different departments as well as the experts and stakeholders. 

This isn’t inherently a bad thing.

It’s helpful for everyone to know each other and understand what they contribute to each process and company goal. Opportunities for new ways of thinking or combining forces can come from these sessions.  

After all, it was at this point that businesses would discover redundant tasks or expenses that were actually unnecessary to their success. To get to that stage, stakeholders and owners needed to understand exactly what each worker was contributing to the overall process and company goals. 

If your employees and stakeholders do not find the value in these sessions, however, they can be perceived as quite frustrating and pointless to attend for all involved parties. Everyone will become reluctant to join and seek ways to avoid them instead. 

Thus, in the past, these workshops would often be considered to be a headache: taking the time to first create the map, which almost instantly became out of date, and then saving it for future improvements or changes that had to be communicated to everyone involved.

Not anymore.  

Software such as ours allows you to design and map your processes on your computer and save it on a cloud-based server: a process library. 

Our tool makes the mapping process collaborative and asynchronous, as employees can add to the maps as things shift according to their tasks. And, thanks to the library, they can always go back to the map if they have any questions, or during training. Process owners are encouraged to review their maps quarterly or annually to ensure they stay up-to-date and relevant. 

As a company leader or business owner, you can also always easily stay updated on how processes are working by checking the library.

Having your process maps saved in one place will also make running workshops for process improvement a lot easier.

It is no longer necessary to use a ton of pen and paper to create them. You can simply create them on a screen and interactively add or remove them as you capture information during the workshop. And, as mentioned above, this can be done with teams asynchronously as well, allowing relevant employees to share their contributions in their own time.

All employees can understand how their tasks contribute to the company, and as an owner, you can refer back to it for improvement or to see how a new tool or vertical would fit. Quite quickly, once you find the best process for specific goals and repeat it enough, you can make it company standard and use it for training.

Thus, with a process library, your company retains knowledge and is able to standardise its processes.

In short, having a process library helps you:

• Create better company alignment so that everyone is aware of how their work contributes to company goals without having redundancies
• Identify new opportunities to grow or verticals to explore, as well as spots to reduce costs and improve your business further
• Understand your own current constraints and work within them, not against them

If you do not have all of your mapped processes available and accessible, keeping track of them becomes a nightmare and your business will suffer for it. You want to build company knowledge, not lose it once your team member that had everything in their head but not mapped out retires or leaves. 

Fortunately, in the 21st century, technology can help you out.

How to Build a Process Library With Skore 

With Skore, it is not only easy to map out a process. It is also easy to create a process library for all of your processes.

You can save that process and refer back to it too via the process library feature.

Managing your processes has never been easier thanks to it.

Utilising and managing it correctly is easy, so long as you remember a few basic factors. The library should be a repository of all process knowledge for the company, easy to find, and easy to navigate via a simple process catalogue and a shared notation language.

At Skore, we prefer to use Universal Process Notation (UPN).

We find that UPN ensures everyone in the company, no matter their rank or role, can understand what is being shown before them intuitively. There is no room for misinterpretations or confusion, no need for additional certifications, and it keeps process maps clean and uncluttered. 

Our software provides a portal of the different maps you can access, as well as a tagging system to make it easier to find one process over the other as needed or to group together certain process types. 

Why would you group some processes under a similar tag? 

Variations, such as accounting for odd payroll situations, or new iterations of processes as you explore different steps or technology you can adapt for improvement. You do not want to edit the official process map until you’ve tried out alternatives.

You are able to edit permissions to certain processes as well as generate reports, all from the comfort of the library portal. And keeping track of edits can be done via a visit to history, to see who has changed it and how it has changed.

Permissions and sharing are encouraged with our tool, as process mapping is a collaborative job. With a library, however, you can share a map but not make it editable for all employees, simply ensure they have the company knowledge to turn to as needed.

Conclusion 

Your business processes absolutely need to be mapped for you to truly understand your business.

Without this visualisation, it is akin to managing your business blind.

But once you map them, how do you keep track of them? How do you use them to train new employees or to continue improving?

Instead of having to constantly map your processes for specific workshops or keeping everything as lists in multiple documents, it is easier than ever to have all of your maps in one place: a process library.

Retain company knowledge, have ready training materials, and explore alternatives or improvements – all in one place!

Get in touch with our team at Skore so that we can help you start building your process library today.

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Legal Industry Trends 2023 – The Great Resignation

This blog post was written by Adam Harbon.

According to an legal industry trends report from Clio, three of the top challenges Legal firms will face in 2023 are:

• Lawyers experiencing the “Great Resignation” trend.
• The increased adoption of remote work, providing flexibility but also causing work-life balance issues.
• The impact of inflation and a potential recession.

Having spent just over a month at Skore and spoken with numerous legal firms in the past few months, I have already witnessed these challenges and agree with the Clio report.

This is the first of a series of blogs from Skore looking at the opportunities for Process Optimisation within legal firms. I’ll focus on the potential implications of implementing a dynamic, insightful and engaging process platform as a way to combat the above issues.

In this first blog let’s examine the Impact of the Great Resignation. Having spoken with a Top 25 UK based legal firm three weeks ago, I was walked through a challenge they were facing with retaining top undergraduate talent, this is not unusual. Unfortunately lots of processes related to client matters within legal firms can be highly complex. The firm was struggling to keep top talent as initially new starters were placed on mundane client work where the processes are unclear or undocumented. In this situation the processes are disparate and split across multiple systems (Visio, PowerPoint, Excel) and some even on paper. These poorly documented processes led to lack of engagement and frustration and contributed to this firm losing top talent to their competition. 

If you consider the cost of hiring and sourcing top undergraduate talent, to lose them to the competition in under 12 months means there is a huge loss associated with this challenge. Let alone the time wasted onboarding and cultivating skills and talent for your firm.

Skore addresses this challenge by ensuring process standardisation. Starting with common client matter processes that are easy to map and document on the platform, the overall goal is to create a legal process library for the firm. This process library, easy to update and share with new talent, provides a constant reference and support to any new talent joining your team and helps you understand where your bottlenecks or frustrations may lie. 

If you’d like to know more about how Skore is helping legal firms or for a summary of the potential you could recognise from implementing Skore or have any feedback on this blog, please comment or contact me: [email protected] 

Read on to explore Adam’s next blog in the series – The Increased Adoption of Remote Working