Hey guys and welcome back to Best Practice TV in this episode what we're
talking about is a generic business process flow it's something that we want
to talk through for every business and just getting a really clear
understanding about where your process starts and stops so I'll go through that
we'll lay it out on the whiteboard and if you've got any questions or if you want
practical examples for your business comment below because that's what this
is all about so you put the comments in and I'll give you practical examples
we'll shoot another video stay tuned. Okay so thanks for joining us what I
want to just quickly do on the whiteboard is just do a really quick
run-through of the business process flow. I can use Best Practice as an example or
I can use a building company or a manufacturing company as an example, but
ideally what most companies have is this really generic process flow and I'll
just quickly knock it out and we'll go from there so everybody starts with
marketing, so we're doing marketing and you know that might be informal or
formal and we'll go into the depth of that later on then we go through to
sales and that's really getting you know marketing could be just that
you're a restaurant you've got to sign out the front, sales is you know people
come in and sit down and then the service starts obviously offering stuff
from the menu or it could be a business like ours where we do lots of stuff on
Facebook YouTube Instagram all that sort of stuff and then we've got a sales team
some of that online some of it face to face then we move into finance.
I'm going to call this one here operations and then we've got, let's call
it dispatch for example. So really generic, really basic, flow to any
business and really it comes down to you know what you're doing here so you could
be just the warehouse you could be a restaurant but if you think about
operations that's just the doing part of the product or service that you guys
do and then obviously dispatch. Here at Best Practice we obviously don't have
dispatch but we've got this process flow . So when we're starting to
look at that you know if you think about a factory for example and I was speaking
to a client the other day who's got a manufacturing facility so they've got a
design component to what they do then they've got a fabrication component to
what they do and then they've got, you know a distribution and dispatch
component so either the customers can pick things up at their the door of
their factory or they'll freight them out to the
customer. So they're obviously doing a lot of marketing they've got a sales
team they do the financial component which is the invoicing, now in that
incidence the operations comes before the invoicing that's what we
call a cash negative business. If you're collecting the money before you give the
product or service that's a cash positive business and then obviously
they do dispatch. So often that can change you know as businesses chop and
change and evolve over time you know who does what and how it happens, it can
chop and change and what you'll start to realize that you might make shoelaces
for example and so you've supplied the shoelaces to the company that makes the
shoes and so you could vertically integrate that business and you could
actually buy the shoe factory or the shoe factory could buy your business and
then those processes get connected together and you start to add modules to
your operations so we'll talk about that later on but what's really critical from
this presentation is what I want you to understand is this thing here which is w
w w w h. Now my question to you is what does that stand for, what do you think?
Well it's who, it's what, it's when, it's where, and it's how. Now there's something
missing from there if you've heard this before what's missing it's the why. Now
I'm not going to go into the why, I'll leave that to Simon Sinek if you've
watched any of Simon Sinek videos or his TED talk on YouTube has had a couple of
million views, he talks about why but that the why is because this is our business
and so when you talk about all the people that work for the business
they're obviously there to earn their money and go home and you know
look after their rent and their mortgage and their kids and their family and all
their household expenses but ultimately the why is it's about delivering this
amazing service to a customer. So the question is for each of these stages we
want to start to identify all of these elements and do a matrix,
if you like, and so we've got who, what, when, where ,and how for each of these
stages. So who's in marketing, what are they doing, when are they doing it,
where are they doing it, how are they doing it, why, because it's about
customers. When you get to sales who, what, when, where and how. Finance, who, what, when
where, and how and so who, might be the customer paying their bill. Operations,
operations might have a few components of the business that we're talking about
the other day it's got design, it's got fabrication and
it's got a painting facility. So they design stuff and they fabricate it and
then they paint it, and again we need to look at who, what, when, where, and how and
do the responsibilities matrix, who, what, when, where, and how. Who, what, when, where
and how and then when we go to dispatch, they've got packaging and they've
got Freight and maybe storage or warehousing and so again for each of
these we've got to do the same thing who, what, when, where, and how and what I'm
saying here is that it's not optional.
You can't leave one of these things out and particularly the particular issue
that was a contentious one in that particular business on that particular
day was around packaging and so when we're talking about who someone has to
package the product because ISO 9001 in the quality system for example it says
well what's the post manufacturing protection of quality before you hand it
over to the customer now it's well known that in this particular business the
things that they make and they paint that all are very beautiful they will
get damaged it's from a risk-based thinking perspective which is what all
ISO standards are talking about now from a risk-based thinking perspective stuff
gets damaged in transport okay so who is going to package it now that what we're
talking about here is before you take on a deal before you service a
customer it's important to be thinking about the next stage and you've got to
answer all these questions you can't leave one of them out you
can't leave the who out because something will bounce around the
business and no one will know whose responsibility is and you can't leave
out the how, because people won't know what to do so you've got to be thinking
okay well what's the plan how are we going to do this now you
don't have to think about this whole thing and map it outsides perfect
beforehand but before you move each stage in the process now this could be
one customer at a time or it could be the full design of the business so it
can serve thousands of customers but it's about mapping out those processes.
Now obviously a couple of things have prompted me to shoot this particular
process flow for you is because a) we're doing our CRM project so if you've been
watching our YouTube channel you know that we're redesigning our CRM database
and the company helping us wants to know what our process flows are so they want
to know this who what when where and how for each of these stages but equally
when you're trading with a customer in this particular business that I'm
talking about I won't name names, they have an issue with from each of these
business units who does the packaging who does the freight and who does the
storage and the question there was is it someone from each of these three teams
or is it the customer, so in that particular business their service stops
here and the customer takes over so where does the customer take over is the
question because then the customer can who the customer takes responsibility
for the packaging and the freight in that example so it is important to
understand you know this shift backwards and forwards of these
responsibilities so you avoid confusion and confusions the key word there. So
I'll just wrap this up I think it's something to really start to think about
it does start to unpack something that we've got here at Best Practice which is
what we call our organizing board so we look at all the responsibilities all the
tasks for each of our teams and then we you know there's you know hundreds and
hundreds of bullet points in each of these you know team descriptions
if you like and then that's got obviously here at Best Practice it's got
the CEO and I've got managers in each of these teams in my business so
I use this system it's quite effective then we can sit down and particularly
the how, over here if you like, this one here for all of these how-how-how
you know at the bottom of each of these these are what we would call methods. Now
this is where lots of companies get really caught up in what does their
management system look like because they think they need to go and write
thousands and thousands of documents but I can probably guarantee that the
finance team really don't need a lot of policies and procedures because they've
trained as accountants and they have you know four or five years worth of
training they just know how to do their job and there might be a few little
guidance policies or documents that you give them. But when you get to your
operations part of your business there are some pretty big risks if
you like with design in this particular business, fabrication or paint or if it
was a construction company you know you've got design, construction
management, and you know project completion. If you're a service based
business that's got you know lots of services like us, we've got you know
policies and procedures and processes and methods around delivering our
service because there's some key risks that we've got to manage and key word
here control so the methods here specify what we would call controls and you can
have different levels of controls and we'll do that in another video but this
is your management system because this captures your methods you can capture
your methods with policies procedures videos audio files all those methods are
the way that you communicate how to do things. So the how can be as simple as
well the person just gets it and they're able to do it or if they don't know what
they're doing and they're doing it for the first time then they can go and read
some policies and some guidance notes or watch videos or that sort of thing so
you know YouTube which is something that I obviously really love because we
publish videos but YouTube has become the management system of the internet.
It's the place that you can go for how to do things, so that's a really good
example what you're doing right now is watching video on YouTube to find out
how to do something it's not written down in a document and you're getting my
body language you're getting the inflections in my language in my tone
and my motivation and my charisma, all motivating and inspiring you
to do something can follow the preparation of a process map for your
business now. If I had just sent you an email with a whole bunch of black and
white text there's a good chance that you wouldn't have read it and you
probably would have hit the spam button, but showing your video then you can see
that I'm truly committed to helping you and so what I'd ask that you do is
consider all the different ways that humans can absorb information and
consider that when you put your management system together. So don't buy
templates, templates are gone if you if you're putting a management system
together stop buying templates just do stuff like this
get a whiteboard map it out take a photo of it save the photo that's a great
looking process map when you make it specific for your business take a
picture of it that's a record it's a document you can save it you can insert
that photo that you've taken into a word document or into a Google document and
you can save that and that can be your very first version one of your policy.
So don't get all caught up in templates and headings and company logos and all
that sort of stuff. Keep it really simple use a whiteboard map out your process
flowchart, so comment below, if you want a practical example of this for your
industry I'll do it for you comment below.
We'll get that to you and and I can do you know if you want to send me a
private message on LinkedIn or if you want to send us a message here
Best Practice I've can do a practical example for you and I can say you know
marketing sales finance construction warehouse restaurant accommodation Hotel
airline helicopter business cheerleading studio I'm just looking out the window
at all the factories and I can give you some practical examples of this and
we'll put it on our YouTube channel for everyone to see, but that's the process
flowchart talks about ISO 9001. Gives you a bit of an understanding of what you
need to look at, but most importantly the takeaway here is who, what, when, where, and
how and your how is your methods. So this is the very last thing that you do you
say, how should we communicate with people what they need to do to achieve
these outcomes and move through the business from the process
perspective and partition the responsibilities, who, who, if you make a
change if you have a meeting and a catch-up and you change your process on
the fly and your dynamic and being innovative don't forget that these who's,
how are you going to communicate with them that you've changed the process and
someone else is responsible. You negotiated a different type of contract
and the customer took responsibility for this process
how are your business know about that because you know what will happen, people
in your business will stick their hands up and they'll say not my job now that
can be a good thing happens here Best Practice and it's excellent because the
people whose job it is are the good ones they're the A players they're the
forwards on the football team not the backs or the goalies so take away
comment below I'll give you a practical example that's been the process flow as
part of a management system there's a great bunch of stuff there if you want
more practical examples keep subscribe on our youtube channel give me some
comments below and Jack and I'll have a chat about that we'll see what we can
put together for you and have a look over on our Facebook page our Instagram
page and connect with me personally on LinkedIn so if you're watching the
videos and you love the videos I love interacting with everybody on LinkedIn
so send me a connection request and I'll see you soon
next time on Best Practice TV bye for now.