Why Should You Investigate Business Process Optimisation?

In any company, there is always a desire to optimise business processes. However, the wider running of a business can result in some solutions being overlooked. IT service improvement is one such area where Business Process Optimisation is possible but not always utilised, especially when it comes to moving those business processes.

There are many business processes optimisation opportunities within every organisation but not everyone will know how to get the most out of them, or if improving them is an appropriate option in the first place. At Vissensa, we can help make understanding and moving these processes (or in “IT speak” – workloads) easier and get businesses working smarter.  

In the IT industry, we would call this workload migration. 

Firstly, what is workload migration? Well, workload migration is the process of moving, most commonly, a service (the workload) to somewhere new, somewhere where it can operate more efficiently, securely and help the day-to-day operations of everyone involved in your business. 

As businesses expand and grow, what once suited the needs of the company can start to run out of steam. So, as your growth picks up, you really have two options; continue to do what you’re doing, potentially creating problems for yourself further down the line, or look at moving these workloads to optimise your business processes now, and for the future.  

If you are beginning to see your business scale up, and you are still running all your services through that mystery box in the corner, this might well be for you.  

But, if this is the case, what are your options? 

One would be to take that box and move it to a datacentre – this is called colocation.  

Colocation is one way to improve the performance of your technology and, in doing so, improve business processes. Colocation refers to where your IT equipment is housed, placing equipment, such as servers, in a separate facility (a datacentre) in which you rent the space you need for the hardware you have.  

There are plenty of reasons why this is worth your consideration but most of it can fall under the umbrella of peace of mind. Colocation obviously offers the space for equipment, but with that comes power, cooling and bandwidth, offering reliability for your processes and services. On top of this there is added security, both physical and in the running of your hardware. Physical security refers to who has in-person access to the facility, which is monitored and controlled via strict security protocols. The other security aspect is the power backups on offer, meaning you can rely on your services to be up and always running.  

If you feel your business is beginning to outgrow what you currently have in place, colocation is also a less expensive alternative than having to build new facilities on your own site.  

This is not the only option of course – moving processes to the cloud is also a possibility and comes with its own opportunities for business process optimisation and technology improvements. 

With moving services to the cloud, you are moving the digital operations of the business into the cloud from your onsite equipment. This is a data move, rather than the physical move involved in colocation, and requires strong planning but can be a great way to avoid outdated systems hampering business in the future. If you are running off outdated, or “legacy,” hardware or software, this will have implications for your efficiency, flexibility, security and can put you on the backfoot in relation to your competitors.  

Cloud migration is an effective way to scale up to bigger workloads and larger numbers of users without having to buy and set up more equipment. This means that as well as greater scalability, there is also a chance to reduce costs. Cloud providers will also take care of maintenance – upkeep and upgrades – so you can better focus on other aspects of your business. 

There is flexibility afforded by the cloud that can be accessed by users from wherever they need to, meaning that your business can expand further afield, even internationally. With the possibility of also increasing your business performance and user experience, by reducing latency (the time taken for data to move from place to place) moving to the cloud is certainly another area to consider when looking at your business processes.  

Once you have opened your business up to the options for business process optimisation, you can look into automating services as a way of increasing efficiency further.  

Automating services is exactly as it sounds, setting up processes for tasks, allowing them to be completed by a machine, automatically, or via a trigger. It replaces manual tasks with automatic ones and leaves you with more time for other important tasks.  

This automation can streamline tasks in areas that can otherwise prove time-consuming, helping your business processes to run smoothly. This doesn’t just have to be those bigger tasks; it can be as simple as those day-to-day processes that take up all that time. So, suddenly that tedious data entry you have to do every day is a thing of the past. Once you start working in the digital world, you begin to make optimising your business processes easier where it can really make a difference. 

Obviously, automating services saves resources (if something is happening automatically, you won’t have to waste time on it) but it can also save money on things such as labour costs. It can also mean tasks will happen quicker as the time-consuming bits of your IT processes are already taken care of. When you strip it down further, automation takes out the risk of human error with some of your more complicated business processes, ensuring you can be confident in everything running efficiently. 

Whilst this may all sound ideal in terms of IT service improvement and business process optimisation, it may also be a little daunting. But if it sounds like something you may be interested in, at Vissensa we can help. Feel free to contact us for a chat and a free business process optimisation consulting and begin your IT optimisation journey.