Sound familiar?
A colleague is on vacation and nobody knows how to handle a complaint. A sales rep promised a delivery date, but the warehouse has no idea. A new hire started a month ago and keeps asking how things work - because nothing is written down.
These are not unusual situations. In small and medium companies, this is everyday reality. And usually, it gets handled somehow. Someone calls, someone writes an email, someone remembers. It works - until it doesn’t.
Do you recognize your company?
Go through this list. If you check more than 3 items, you probably have room to improve:
- Key information lives in one person’s head. When they’re away, everyone waits.
- You don’t know how long a process really takes. From receiving an order to shipping - how long is it? Days? Weeks?
- New employees take months to get up to speed. Because everything is passed on verbally.
- Multiple people do the same work without knowing about each other. Two people updating the same spreadsheet.
- Customers ask about their order status - and you have to call three departments.
- Errors are fixed instead of prevented. The same problems over and over again.
- Approvals take days. Because an email sits in an inbox and nobody knows it’s waiting.
- Everyone does things slightly differently. Two sales reps handle quotes in completely different ways.
- When something goes wrong, you look for someone to blame instead of the root cause.
If you thought “that’s exactly us” - keep reading.
What is a business process, anyway?
The word “process” sounds complex. In reality, it’s simple: a process is a repeatable sequence of steps that leads to a result.
Examples:
- A customer sends an inquiry - someone processes it - a quote is created - the customer confirms - the order is fulfilled. That’s a process.
- An employee gets sick - they report it - a colleague covers for them - work is handed over. That’s a process too.
- An invoice arrives - someone checks it - it’s approved - it’s paid. Again, a process.
Processes exist in your company whether you manage them or not. The difference is whether they work reliably, or whether the outcome depends on who happens to be in the office that day.
The real cost of chaos
When processes don’t work, you’re paying for it - even if it doesn’t show up on an invoice.
Time. People spend hours searching for information, repeating work, and dealing with things they shouldn’t have to. In an average company with 30 employees, that can easily be 200+ hours a month - purely on unnecessary work.
Errors. Every mistake costs you a fix. A wrong shipment, an incorrect invoice, a missed deadline - these are real costs. And every error erodes customer trust.
Employee frustration. People want to do meaningful work. When they spend half their day dealing with confusion, motivation drops. And motivated employees are the ones who leave first.
Customer experience. Your customer doesn’t see your internal problems. They see that the order arrived late, that nobody called them back, that they received the wrong product. And next time, they’ll order from someone else.
A real-world story: A logistics company with 30 employees
Imagine a company called LogiTrans (the name is fictional, the situation is real). Thirty employees, eight of them in administration. They process shipping orders for business clients.
How it worked: Orders came in by email. A sales rep forwarded them to the dispatcher, who entered them into an Excel spreadsheet. If an order was non-standard, the sales rep asked a colleague because they “know how it’s done.” Meanwhile, the customer called reception asking about the status - and the receptionist had to track down three people before getting an answer.
What happened:
- Three people worked on the same orders without knowing about each other.
- Nobody knew exactly who was responsible for what.
- Shipments were delayed because information got lost in email threads.
- Customers were frustrated. Two key clients threatened to leave.
What the company did: They didn’t start a revolution. They didn’t buy a new system. They simply sat down and described how an order moves through the company - step by step. They found where information gets lost and where work is duplicated. Then they made three simple changes: clearly assigned responsibilities, introduced a shared spreadsheet with current order status, and agreed on one communication channel instead of email threads.
Result after 6 weeks: Shipment delays dropped by 40%. Customers stopped calling reception because they received proactive updates. And three people in administration finally had time for work that actually moves the company forward.
Where to start?
The most important advice: don’t try to fix everything at once.
Pick one process that causes the most pain. The one people complain about. The one where mistakes happen most often. The one that affects your customers the most.
It could be:
- Order processing
- Employee onboarding
- Complaint handling
- Invoice approval
- Shift handover
Pick one. Describe it. Look at it. Then improve it.
Sounds simple? It is simple. The hard part is starting. But once you see the first results, you’ll want to keep going.
What’s next?
In the next article, we’ll show you how to map a process - step by step, without fancy tools. All you need is a pen, paper, and the willingness to look at things as they actually work (not how they should).