One of the most important skills to have as an office manager, team leader, or indeed a business owner is the ability to identify and mitigate “pain points” in you organization.
These aren’t minor inconveniences—they’re bottlenecks that slow down critical business functions. When removed from your work environment, everything feels streamlined and smooth; all is as it should be.
In today’s post, we’ll take a look at understanding and identifying pain points, teach you about a particular pain point that sometimes goes overlooked in some businesses for years on end, and how to start thinking in terms of automation to ease or outright eliminate these kinds of bottlenecks in your own organization.
Understanding & Identifying Workflow Pain Points
Here’s an example of a pain point: imagine a business where employees “just know” that it takes weeks for an expense to be reimbursed. Or how about printer problems that employees simply “work around” due to sluggish communication with the IT department—or in the cases of SMBs without dedicated IT personnel, a problem that remains for months or years on end?
Ultimately, most office pain points boil down to poor communication. For whatever reason, the people or person responsible for one process may not be able to effectively communicate with someone else down the process chain (or above them on it). Workflow audits are a great way to identify problems like this.
In a moment, we’ll look at some solutions, but let’s first examine a common pain point that often goes unnoticed:
The Hidden Culprit Lurking in Thousands of Offices Around the Country: Duplicate Effort
Duplicate effort—meaning that more than one member of your team is working on the same thing, often unnecessarily—is a big problem for many organizations. Be on the lookout for processes that really only need to be done once but, for whatever reason, are being performed by more than one employee. Think about how you can improve communication or otherwise streamline the process.
Oftentimes the solutions to these problems will be obvious to you during a workflow audit, but if not, you may want to spend some time reviewing your options for workflow automation.
What Pain Points Can Be Eliminated or Automated?
A pain point being eliminated is usually thanks to one of two scenarios: the problem is simply eliminated (as may be the case with duplicate efforts—things have been rearranged to ensure that only one person is expending resources to complete the task, for example), or, more commonly, in finding a way to automate that process.
Your Xerox multifunction printer is, for lack of a better term, an automation powerhouse. To start getting some ideas of what’s possible, you can start on the Professional Document Solutions blog with articles like…
- Crush Sluggish Workflows With These DocuShare Flex Application Integrations
- Easy Expense Management With the Xerox Connect App for Concur
- Thanks to This New Xerox Technology, Note Taking By Hand Just Got a Lot Easier
Professional Document Solutions Helps Colorado Businesses Drive Efficiency and Cut Costs
If you’d like to learn more about using Xerox technology to automate processes in your business, please feel welcome to contact our team at Professional Document Solutions. We’d love to start a conversation with you about how we can help you meet and exceed your unique business goals!
If you’re looking for office upgrades, please request a free quote. You may also wish to consider our managed print service. We look forward to serving you!
