The economy is on a roll. Business profits are increasing, labor markets are tightening, and business innovations are becoming de facto processes. But many businesses are again asking what processes are the most efficient for the organization. 

Process improvement is all about streamlining processes to create greater efficiency on the cost side of the business equation. The old philosophy of chipping away at costs in small increments will only take you so far. That's why so many business have embraced the thinking that through real process efficiency improvement, you can dramatically reduce cost per unit of productivity while increasing scalability.

Many national businesses located in the Northwest have appointed new executives to the role of improving process in their organizations, such as The Standard’s Senior Vice President of Operational Excellence and Washington Mutual’s Executive Vice President of Business Process Excellence. These roles are filled by senior level managers charged with the duty of ensuring high-quality business processes with seamless technology integration.

Business Process Management has traditionally been done by people with stop watches measuring the time it takes to build a widget or by creating diagrams of factory floors to ensure a smooth flow of materials. As recently as three years ago, applying these manufacturing ideas to marketing was speculated as pure fancy. Measuring to what extent an ad resulted in increased sales encompassed so many variables that the only metrics were "gut feeling" and inferences from top line growth.

Managers used to be able to figure out after the fact if an ad was a success or a failure, but they didn’t have the tools to methodically improve effectiveness through improvements in their processes. The Internet caused a paradigm shift. To take but two well known examples, Amazon and eBay spend as much time measuring and improving their campaigns as they do coming up with the next revolutionary ideas for Internet-based commerce.

The success of online business has caught the eye of many “traditional” companies and they are now working to apply this learning to their overall operations. Xerox’s direct marketing teams have applied Lean Six Sigma process improvement tools to test, measure and optimize how marketing efforts directly create qualified leads for sales. They are now able to collect detailed information at every step of the process and then introduce system change to improve profitability of the process. The result has been reduced cost per customer acquisition and a measurable improvement in employee satisfaction.

Businesses need to look at how they are using the Internet to attract leads and establish new customers. Online marketing and web sites should be engineered to be measurable. With the right tools, a marketing manager who runs the search engine marketing, email marketing, lead routing and e-commerce functions on the company web site can demonstrate return on investment (ROI). If the business is willing to adopt process tools to identify and eliminate inefficiencies in the process, then not only can they demonstrate ROI, but they can improve process quality and profitability for each individual marketing initiative. 

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