Being unique within a local region can benefit businesses. In some cases, having a community flavor is a special thing that companies can develop. But being able to maintain a local feel, whether that area is a major city or rural village, needs to be done without sacrificing the global policies that help workers get the job done more efficiently, Business 2 Community reported.
To illustrate this point, B2C pointed to a BBC report on the U.K.'s National Health Service, which is beginning to work on a project to get rid of local variance in certain areas and create broad policies.
According to the BBC, the NHS found its various facilities were following at least 100 different sets of procedures when it came to gathering data on basic vital signs, but the healthcare organization is working to create a single holistic policy that is followed in every facility. B2C explained that such practices are needed for processes that can easily be standardized and should be common, regardless of where a company is located. Essentially, businesses have to identify the procedures that are standard and those that should vary based on such factors as location.
In many cases, policies that are specific to a local office that is a part of a larger organization create excess complexity that is not needed in a corporate world that increasingly depends on companies running multiple branch offices, the report explained.
Business process management software is emerging as an ideal solution for companies working to standardize processes, the news source said. Process management can help companies think horizontally about processes, making sure best practices are aligned across all parts of an organization, not just isolated within specific branches while other groups ignore them.
BPM solutions make this possible because they enable businesses to automate many of the standardized technological tasks that can vary substantially from one office to another. This enables an organization to better sift through the large quantities of data generated by cloud, mobile and social sources and ensure workers instead focus on following best practices. By streamlining the tedious processes that often lead to employees taking shortcuts and providing context for key information, BPM can help organizations instill a greater sense of procedural unity within operations.
