Standard Operating Procedures Consulting

Your business operations are dependent on how you plan and execute them. If these are planned well, the likelihood of achieving the targeted output is much higher. Without a planned workflow, your business is dependent on vague ways of working. This can pose serious challenges in carrying out business activities like addressing customer grievances, managing warehouse operations, making payments to suppliers, recruitment and onboarding, carrying out a digital marketing campaign, etc.

In a predefined, detailed, and systematic workflow, the chances of mistakes and deviating from the required performances drastically go down. These defined workflows are Standard Operating Procedures or SOPs. SOPs serve as an operational roadmap for employees. It also facilitates monitoring and supervising. It defines the operational standards of performance and output of carrying a business activity. More importantly, it makes a business more process-driven and less people-dependent. Leveraging SOPs for business development has turned out to be a key operational strategy in carrying out business growth and expansion projects. SOP is the long-standing buzzword of business process improvement consultants around the world.

Few challenges without SOPs

Slow down

Business operations need speedy and precise execution whether it is the frontline or the support functions. The flow of work has to be known in advance, everyone involved must know their role, and the expected output and standards of performance at every stage of the operation must be explicit. If it is not so, there will be wasted time into decision-making, unnecessary communications, bypassing of accountability and responsibilities, and wasted working hours resulting in slowing down of the business operations.

Workflow breakdown

In an undefined or vague working system, workflow breakdowns are just waiting to occur. If you do not know what tasks are lined up for the day, you may feel like taking a day off as well. If an employee does not know what to do next (authorized workflow) and his supervisor is in a meeting, he may have to spend hours waiting and getting frustrated. This will also affect other employees and their work.

Poor CX

The quality of business operations is mirrored in the experience delivered to customers. If there are inconsistencies in operations, there is no way businesses could stop it from hitting customer experience. For instance, if your quality control operation is vaguely managed, some of your products are surely going to bring bad reviews and returns.

Attrition

Distantly but attrition is positively correlated to the lack of a structured operational working environment. If supervisors and managers dictate new standards or modify workflow every day or every week, employees are bound to feel frustrated after a while. In delivering our business process consulting services, employees’ morale pertaining to the operational environment provided to them remains one of our top prerogatives.

Increased operational costs

If your business processes stand optimized, your operational costs could also be made to hover around at the optimum levels. But if your processes and operations are not defined and documented in the first place, streamlining and optimizing them becomes tedious. As a part of process optimization consulting, experts rely on SOP to map the most efficient ways of carrying out business operations. Although process automation consulting may advocate for technical modernization and up-gradation for so many practical reasons automation is a long-term business goal and it can only replace a defined working system to make sense of automation.

How YRC can help

As a retail consulting company and business process improvement consultants offering business process management consulting services, SOP development is one of our core competencies. We offer SOP consulting services for small, midsize and large retail businesses as well as for franchise businesses. Our focus shall be on establishing routines, consistency of standards, better growth systems, eliminating loss of productivity and writing SOPs for business development. We expect to deliver the many virtues of SOP.

Become process-driven

We can tell from our experience of business process management consulting that when you are running your business without SOPs, you are dependent on undefined ways of working. Even if it is not causing any major hiccup now, this is a short-lived illusion. It may be working for you because you may be having a good, hard-working team or your operations are limited. But when change and disruption strike, SOPs emerge like the core flow of business operations. We see making a business process-driven as the ultimate goal of process consulting and for process consulting companies.

Business continuity

Business activities must not come to a halt for any shortcoming in operational planning. Many times small details are left off unaddressed, anticipating them as rare or with the ‘will see’ approach. When it comes to business operations being managed professionally, such loopholes must not be left unattended. Our motto in business process consulting services and SOP design and development is to make sure that the workflows, in their entirety, are detailed in every operational respect.

Consistency and customer delight

We realize how important consistency of operations and services are in a multi-locational business. We shall take into consideration the practical variations that may exist from store to store or location to location. These assessments help us to craft and customize SOPs that meet the common standards and expectations of operational performance and output.

When internal operations are consistent, the same is reflected on the outside i.e. in customer service. You cannot give 10 days to your suppliers for procurement and promise a delivery time of 7 days to your customers. If you do not tell your employees how to interact with customers, they will do as they please. We address these concerns in SOP development services.

Better workflow, better supervision

What good is an operational roadmap if it is not comprehensive for its users! In our SOP development services, we seek to ensure that the SOPs are easily understood by your employees so that they can follow the defined procedures with an optimum level of training and supervision. Better workflows are also convenient for supervising purposes.

Professional and productive work culture

SOP is like a turnkey for an organization. With SOPs for business processes and operations in place, there is no reason why work should come to a standstill except for any unplanned reason. Everyone in the organization has an assigned role and they need to play by the respective SOPs. Once this key is turned on, the flow of work gets into motion.

Become growth-ready; SOPs for business development

Business expansion or scaling up becomes significantly easier when you are process-driven via SOPs. All you are left to do is replication because your processes already stand proven and tested. Minor variations may be called for but the core flow will be already with you. A professional process design consultant can help you adeptly define your business processes from the scratch.

We are a boutique retail consulting firm. To know more about our SOP development services or if you have any query on robotic process automation consulting, drop us a message and we will get back to you.

SOP Development