Where Are the Bottlenecks in Your Business? | Part 5

Building Better Business Processes - Part 5

Have you ever had a task that should take ten minutes somehow take three days?

Not because the actual work takes three days.

You're waiting for an approval. Someone needs to send you a document. You're missing information. Or the one person who knows the answer isn't available.

That delay might seem small on its own.

But when the same thing keeps happening, it's worth paying attention to.

You might have a bottleneck in your process.

Start With Where You're Waiting

One of the easiest ways to find a bottleneck is to look at where work regularly stops.

Maybe invoices can't be paid until the owner approves every single one.

Maybe bookkeeping can't be completed because receipts or coding information haven't been provided.

Maybe customer billing gets delayed because information has to come from someone in the field first.

Maybe only one employee knows how to complete a certain task.

The problem isn't necessarily the person.

It might be the process they're working with.

How Often Are You Following Up?

Another thing I would look at is how much time you're spending following up.

“Can you approve this?”

“Did you send that over?”

“I'm still waiting on…”

“Do you know the status of this?”

Some follow-up is always going to happen.

But if you're constantly chasing the same information from the same point in a process, that's probably telling you something.

Maybe responsibilities aren't clear.

Maybe there isn't a deadline.

Maybe the person responsible doesn't even know something is waiting for them.

Or maybe the information should have been collected earlier in the process.

Look at the Pattern, Not Just the Individual Problem

When something is holding up your day, your first priority is usually just getting it handled.

Get the approval. Find the document. Send the reminder. Move on.

But if you're doing the same thing again next week, and then again the week after that, fixing the individual problem isn't really fixing anything.

That's when I would start asking:

Why does this keep getting stuck here?

You may not need a complicated solution.

Maybe certain purchases can be approved without going all the way to the owner.

Maybe a form needs one more required field.

Maybe someone needs to be clearly responsible for the next step.

Maybe an automatic reminder would solve half the problem.

Sometimes the frustrating little things you deal with every week are actually showing you exactly where your business processes could be better.