Simple Examples of Process Improvements

by Cathy Gray | Apr 3, 2022 | Professional Articles, Business

If you’ve never worked on business process improvement, it’s easy to think it’s not worth your time or that it’s too hard.

Process improvements do not have to be hard and it doesn’t have to be for large or corporate companies with multiple warehouse and/or locations.

Even small businesses can benefit with simple improvements.

Simple and Easy improvements

Condense your sales cycle: At a small swim shop I worked at, we had a process for supplier labels and inventory sheets that technically worked, but we had done it so many times on autopilot that nobody stopped to ask if it could be better. A few simple changes: consolidating the labels, updating and organizing the sheet: cut down the time spent on something we were doing repeatedly. Sometimes the process that works is still worth a second look.

Excel and Google Sheets automations: Beyond filtering, functions like VLOOKUP and index matching can combine datasets automatically instead of manually cross-referencing and printing things out. If you’re regularly pulling data from two sources and comparing them, that’s a good candidate for automation. Less paper, less manual entry, fewer errors.

Checklists: I kept quarterly and monthly checklists for SEO tasks and competitor analysis. Repetitive work like that is easy to let slip or do out of order without a list keeping you on track. It doesn’t have to be complicated: even a simple Google Sheet with checkboxes gets the job done.

Larger scale: PIM integration: A PIM (Product Information Management) system is essentially a central database for large product data sets. Instead of managing product details across multiple spreadsheets and systems, everything lives in one place and can be pulled from there. Even with a PIM in place, the day-to-day still involved importing, exporting, filtering, and working in batches: but having that single source of truth made the whole process cleaner and more consistent.

Process improvements do not have to be drawn out projects. As you can see in the examples, they can be very simple and reduce your wasted time.