How To Improve Any Business Process

If you are responsible for managing a business or organization of any type, you have undoubtedly sought out opportunities to make things run more smoothly and efficiently. It's only natural. This means that responsible owners and managers are continually looking for opportunities to optimize their business processes.

How about some free advice?

First of all, let's be clear about what it is we're referring to when we use the term 'business process'. In short, a business process is defined as a collection of linked tasks which can find their end in the delivery of a service or product to a client. It has also been defined as a set of activities and tasks that - once completed - will accomplish an organizational goal.

Any business (regardless of how poorly it may be run) employs some type of business process. Some are clearly better than others.

What we refer to as Business Process Management (BPM) can be defined as the set of techniques employed to map the flow of information and communication between various business assets and departments, identify opportunities for improvement, and establish and enforce rules to optimize the process moving forward. These techniques can (and should) be employed continually.

A BPM system can provide any company with several measurable benefits:

• The ability to identify otherwise unknown inefficiencies
• Reduced downtime and cost associated with wasted time and material
• The ability to connect processes over multiple facilities and or operations
• Automation of repeated and/or predictable tasks
• Establishment of a program for continual improvement

These benefits are very attainable. Provided you use the right tools and follow a simple procedure, anyone can realize the improved efficiency and reduced waste that BPM systems provide. And what is the correct procedure? In very simple terms:

1. Analyze Current Processes - Create a business process map to paint a clear picture of the current flow of information between different business assets. Use this map to uncover inefficiencies and establish a preferred methodology.
2. Establish and Enforce New Rules - Define rules for how you would like information to flow, and create workflow assignments to automate tasks or send automatic notifications to people who need to be involved in enforcing the new rules.
3. Implement, Train, Rinse and Repeat - Once the new process is clearly defined and automated, ensure that all parties are fully trained and equipped to adhere to these new rules moving forward. You can create custom dashboards to track real-time data, create a centralized knowledge base that is shared and continually updated, and use automated real-time notifications to be sure that everyone is always aware of the current state of the process. Finally, ensure that your new process is fully repeatable and scalable to allow for continual evaluation and improvement.

Seems pretty simple, right? It can be when you combine your innate understanding of your business process with the right tools.

Writing Your Life Story Tips And Techniques For Success

Once a luxury of the rich and famous, technology has, for the first time in history, made it possible for anyone to capture, share and preserve their most precious life stories. With the advent of computers, the Internet, digital photography, video, and audio, anyone can capture the richness and texture of their life stories. These personal histories will be appreciated by family, friends, and future generations.

Today it is possible to easily blend the art of traditional biography and memoir with powerful new technologies into a new form of individual life storytelling: the personal life history. Personal life histories are satisfying to create. And, because of the interactive multimedia possibilities inherent in computers and the web, a well-done personal life history can be rich and fully rounded in ways that are impossible to achieve in text-only memoir or biography. But most importantly, personal life histories preserve vital individual and family stories. And, when properly done, they will last for generations.

In this article you will discover how to use time-honored life story writing techniques along with the latest technologies to create a story that is uniquely "you."

The Art of Traditional Life-Story Formats

For anyone interested in creating their own autobiography, memoir or personal life history, it is important to understand the distinctions between these forms of telling one's own life story. To over-generalize for a moment, an autobiography is more fact-based, while a memoir is more emotion-based.

Autobiographies are written by the subject, sometimes with the collaboration of another writer. Autobiographical works take many forms, from intimate writings made during life that are not necessarily intended for publication (including letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, and reminiscences) to the formal autobiography. Interestingly, the autobiography format does not necessarily have to be true. It may also be a literary fictional tale.

Memoirs are a form of personal recollection that has grown enormously in popularity in recent times. Memoirs often focus on more subjective recollections such as memories, feelings, and emotions and are generally written from the first-person viewpoint. The memoir is often focused on capturing certain meaningful highlights or moments.

In his own Memoir, Palimpest, Gore Vidal writes that "a memoir is how one remembers one's own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked."

Memoirs usually focus on a brief period of time or a series of connected events (an autobiography covers a longer time period). In a memoir, the writer is usually retrospective, and contemplating past events. Memoirs may incorporate the techniques of storytelling such as setting, plot, conflict, character development, foreshadowing, flashback, irony or symbolism. And lastly, writing one's memoir often has a therapeutic effect for the writer.

Oral History Recordings

An oral history is a verbatim transcription of an interview, left in the narrator's exact words. These are usually left in a question-and-answer style and are an economical way to preserve family stories. A recording system with a good-quality microphone and a quiet spot free from interruptions are all that is really needed to capture an oral history. It helps to have questions prepared in advance of the interview.

Oral histories are usually recorded using analog tape or digital recording equipment, but it is also possible to record directly into a personal computer. Oral histories are often transcribed (typed or word processed) into a document format. The conversational style is appealing for its easygoing informality.

Caveats: Recording formats and standards are constantly evolving and could become difficult or impossible to play back if the equipment becomes obsolete. Taped recordings decay over time.

Video History Recordings

Do-it-Yourself: At the basic level, it's easy and fun to create a basic video history. Camcorders are relatively inexpensive, and many computers today come with basic editing software. Capturing a good video history shares all of the same prerequisites as an audio recording: a quiet spot, with questions prepared in advance. Plus, you will want an uncluttered background, flattering lighting, and right clothing to improve the quality of the end product. White shirts, pants or dresses, for example don't show up well on video. Likewise, busy patterns can be distracting. Solid light-colored neutrals or pastels are usually safe.

Professional videographers: A large number of professional video companies specialize in the creation of life story productions. Productions may range from a 10 or 15 minute short to an hour or longer mini-movie, complete with titles, music, and other Hollywood-style effects. Naturally, you'll pay more for a professional production than a homegrown effort.

When selecting a professional use all the usual smart-consumer tips. Ask for references. Ask to see samples of prior work. Get all costs, production timetables and commitments in writing. It's delightful to have movies of an individual or family. When well-executed they often have entertainment value and are great for special occasions.

Caveat: As with audio recordings, formats change over time, and media can degrade, even with proper storage methods

The Integration of Art and Technology: Web-Based Personal Life Histories

Just in the last few years, the Web has emerged as a powerful new medium for creating and sharing life stories. On the web it is not only possible, it is enjoyable and easy to create a rich multimedia story with text, photos, audio and video. This is the new format of the personal life history.

Web-based personal life histories enjoy several advantages over paper-based publishing, audio, video, or even CD life stories. Specifically, Web-based publication is updateable-one can add new information at any time. It is easily shareable among friends or family. The most advanced sites offer choices of privacy and security protection. The web is also multimedia, meaning you can add text, photos, audio, and video. Photos, audio, video are never lost, damaged destroyed. An finally, many sites offer print-on-demand, allowing you to create instant books. The books may be printed on your home printer, or sent out to small-run publishers. If you choose the small-run option, be sure to specify archival quality paper.

One of the biggest advantages of web publishing is the ability to build community around similar interests, occupations, backgrounds or life events. For example, a WWII veteran pilot who posts his story to the Web and makes it available to the public may be contacted by long-lost friends, other veterans, students, historians, museum personnel, or others interested in this pivotal chapter in American history.

Why Create Your Personal Life History?

Mark Twain once said: "There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is impossibility. Inside everyone, there is a drama, a comedy, a tragedy."

A personal life history can be as short as a few pages, or several volumes in length. Whatever the length or medium, it requires thoughtfulness and sometimes quite a bit of work to accomplish. But the work is worthwhile because it has the ability to influence generations ahead. Your personal life history may leave a legacy for your children and grandchildren. As with memoir, writing a personal history allows you to examine and reflect on your life up to the present day. It lets you add your story to the larger historical record of your family, city, and country. And lastly, if you don't do it, who will?

Start with a Timeline of Life Chapters

How does one start to tell the story of a life that may cover 60, 70, 80 years or more? Often it's helpful to create a chronological timeline of major events in your life. It helps to jot down a few notes around key phases in your life. In fact, you may already be thinking of your life as a book, with separate, distinct chapters built around important life episodes.

Of course, not everyone's life follows an identical chronological sequence, but here are a few ideas for chapter headings for your book or story. GreatLifeStories.com uses the following "chapters" to organize life stories:

o Your Beginnings

o In Your Neighborhood

o School Days

o Off to Work

o Romance and Marriage

o War and Peace

o Triumphs and Tragedies

o Words of Wisdom

o Humor

o Words of Gratitude

The chapter system is very flexible. For example, you don't have to start your life story with the days of your birth and youth. Perhaps you had a fascinating experience during the war. As with a movie, you might open your life story with that "scene," then tell the story how you got there.

Once you've got an idea for the "flow," of your story, here are some more specific guidelines to help add color, texture, and authenticity:

1. Just start writing! Do a mind dump. Get it out of your head and down on paper, the computer, the tape recorder, wherever. Don't worry about how it sounds. Just write. Resist the temptation to edit yourself; there will be time for editing later.
2. Be yourself. Don't worry if your grammar or spelling isn't perfect. Write it as you would say it.
3. Honesty is everything. The best writing tells it like it happened.
4. Include humor. Favorite jokes, stories, anecdotes
5. Detail, detail, detail. What kind of floor did the kitchen have? What color was the scarf she wore when you first met?
6. Go at a comfortable pace. Don't try to capture an entire lifetime in a single session of furious writing. Write, allow time to reflect, and return again to writing.
7. Consult others. Family members and friends can be invaluable sources of facts and interpretation.
8. Use photos to jog your memory. Tip: Set out photos in a timeline of your life, starting from your very youngest days, and moving through current times. Write or record to your visual storyboard
9. Look for themes in your life. Themes are broad ideas that are central to your life. Did you always want to be a pilot? A preacher? Own a restaurant? Be a farmer? Tell the story of how you met your goal, or how the goal changed to something else totally unexpected.

Here are just a few other thematic life story possibilities: a. The Spiritual quest b. The Confession c. The Travelogue d. The Portrait e. The Complaint f. Humor g. The Family history h. The Road to Recovery i. War Story j. Romance

Another Option: Hire a Professional

Most of this article has been focused on creating the do-it-yourself personal life history. There is, of course, the option of working with a professional. The right professional writer or videographer is a highly skilled interviewer and has the proper tools and equipment. And, believe it or not, it is sometimes easier for someone to open up in front of a stranger rather than in front of a family member.

There are many approaches to working with writers or videographers. However, there are a number of similarities in common. The writer/videographer often:

1) Meets with you to determine the scope and cost of the project.

2) Usually sets up taped interview sessions. Depending on your objectives, these may be an hour or two, or 10, 20 hours or more.

3) The recording is transcribed and edited with your input and guidance

4) Once a final manuscript/movie is agreed upon, it may be sent out for printing or duplication.

5) For books, personal history professionals recommend archival bindings and acid-free paper for longevity

6) You receive the number of books/movies agreed upon in your contract.

7) Be sure to discuss services, fees and end products in advance, and get all agreements in writing.

Thanks to high technology, the art of capturing and preserving the stories from one's own life is now open to more people and easier than ever before. A new genre of personal storytelling is emerging that draws on the literary traditions of the autobiography and memoir, while adding audio, video, and web technology to create personal life histories. On the Web, these personal stories personal life histories are multimedia, collaborative, shareable, and instantly updateable.

Business Process Outsourcing The Benefits and Advantages

Today's economy demands changes in the way we do business. The growth in the BPO industry is one sure indication that the economy has indeed transformed our perspective on the way we should do things. Nowadays, companies choose to outsource non-essential parts of their business, preserving their money and making sure that they remain competitive, both in the local and the global market.

Business process outsourcing came about as companies began to realize that they were performing some processes which, while very important and essential, were not really connected with the kind of enterprise that they were running. Money was being spent to train individuals and buy equipment that those individuals used in performing their duties. This was not an ideal situation, and in the 1990s, many organizations simply had to cut costs where they could to survive the harsh business climate. Although a few processes were already outsourced, BPO boomed during this decade and beyond. Today, the industry is estimated to be worth $180 billion.

Outsourcing companies recognized the need for quality office services, and these firms have spurred the growth of the industry. There are a lot of business process outsourcing services to choose from today, and many of them are provided by offshore companies located in countries like India and the Philippines. Customer care services are a huge part of the BPO industry. Instead of speaking to an actual employee of the company, customers with concerns ranging from sales to technical problems speak to a representative of that company. These representatives are employees of outsourcing companies with existing contracts to provide call center services for their clients. They are specifically trained for the account that they handle, ensuring that quality services are maintained.

Financial services and accounting are increasingly becoming part of business process outsourcing. These processes are very important to a business. It covers asset management, financial management, accounting and bookkeeping, and financial analysis. While these processes are central to the financial state of a business, they are not central to a business that deals with, say, manufacturing and production. Instead of hiring accounting professionals and spending on an in-house accounting department, many companies choose to outsource these areas instead.

Outsourcing companies also provide human resource management. HR deals with areas such as recruitment, benefits administration, payroll administration, or training. Big companies have a separate HR department, but smaller companies can't afford the maintenance and equipment that HR needs to operate successfully. BPO companies include this in their services, and many organizations respond positively.

Transcription services are one of the processes that companies choose to outsource. A medical transcription company does medical reports, discharge summaries, and other documents in the medical field. In a similar way, legal transcription companies provide transcribed versions of depositions, legal proceedings, or witness statements. The process is simple: a client sends a sound file (MP3, WAV, or another format) of the document to be transcribed, and the BPO services provider sends the transcription back in a few hours. This provides a great benefit for clients who need the transcription immediately.

Business process outsourcing has a lot of advantages that save money for the client company. The industry offers many services that help a company deal with the central parts of its business. Indeed, a business that employs a third-party company to do some of the non-central work for them gets an easy solution to many issues. All signs point to the possibility that BPO is here to stay.

Business Process Management Software Provides the Mainstay for Several Financial Institutions

The concept of business process has lived for many years, but it was not until the 1990s that it manifested itself in its true expression called Business process management software, to take the markets by storm. The software enjoys wide application across the four corners of the world, not only for its tracking techniques, but also for improving their quality and efficiency. This software provides the mainstay for several financial institutions in their daily organization of events. Here we are trying to understand the very basics of the software and the benefits they earn for the Financial Institutions.

Tracking

The Business process management software provides Financial Institutions with a technology driven platform from where they can assess the processes and their efficiency quotients. Financial Institutions apply billing program to track the innumerable processes in a daily operation. If, for example, you consider an application made to a bank branch for a card, someone has to punch this information into the software program. The program will now track the particular employee accessing the data and the specific targeted information, before passing it on to the next step in the process flow, thereby ensuring you vet all tasks through the system, document and monitor them thoroughly.

Reporting

The profound ability of tracking each sub-task within a single process facilitates the Financial Institutions to review the real contribution of these to the task in totality, and study the areas that need improvement. The software has the useful facility for advance reporting, which helps managers to identify the successful processes and simultaneously locate the bottlenecks that slow down other processes. For the financial institutions, accurate reporting of information such as the normal time for scrutinizing a simple account or details of manual processes that take time, are very useful inputs for their continuous improvement and automation program.

Improvement/Automation

Today, automation plays a great part in the progress and improvement of the activities of any organization. After their assessment of the processes that require fine-tuning, the organizations now turn to automation to foster the culture of fast and unswerving decisions universally across the organization, improving the steadfast quality of its decisions and enhancing adherence to lending regulations that do not encourage a biased credit policy. Automation serves the financial institutions in a dual capacity; the consumer has easy access to the financial products when and where they want it, and secondly, it considerably reduces the overheads.

The creative billing program restructures your improvements and the quick elimination of inefficient operations saves you considerable time and investment. The Business process management software plays its part in raising levels of efficiency of the financial institutions by factoring in precise reporting and improvement and going for automation for enhancing their efficiency levels.

Real Life Business Process Improvement Solutions

Business process improvement solutions are often cited for their "optimization" capabilities but few references touch on what it really takes to optimize a business workflow. This is a bit of an oddity since there are so many functions of process improvement solutions to choose from.

Some functions are as simple as using digital documents instead of actual paper. This achieves a number of improvements all at once. The most obvious advantage of using digital reports, order forms and other paperwork is the amount of space that it does not take up. Also, digital documents are easier to search for, track, deliver and secure than paper.

Other functions involve automation. This reduces the need for human intervention in business processes so that employees can focus on more pertinent tasks. For business process improvement solutions, automation involves software that can effect changes in real life business processes with an easy to use graphical user interface (GUI), and software that monitors and provides real-time analytics of the same processes.

Also, business process improvement software enhances collaborative efforts. With new innovations such as online presentation environments and secure version document management solutions, multiple users can work on the same project at the same time so that the load can be distributed among employees without having to be side by side in front of a single computer.

Some real life examples of business process improvement solutions include web-based knowledge portals to access an organization's knowledge database or training materials for new employees, as well as process monitoring dashboards that help managers monitor business processes remotely.

More About Business Process Outsourcing

It's BPO that has developed as a new buzz word. It is something that offers benefits to every business. Did you ever wonder what is business process outsourcing all about? So have a close look at this article. To be very specific, BPO in simple words defines a process through which a company is found to transfer some of its non core or peripheral business processes.

When talking about the non core business operations, it naturally refers to the back office operations to a third party vendor. This is one process that offers the outsourcing service providers to take the total control over certain processes that stands significant for every business in terms of its growth and development. Nowadays, most third world destinations are found to include the major names of the service providers in this global market.

What makes business process outsourcing popular?

Business process outsourcing includes a range of specialized services starting from call center functions to the transaction processing and much more. Apart from these, the back office operations, telemarketing, the customer relationship management, payroll maintenance, billing, accounting, HR management, finance, logistics management, supply chain management, medical transcriptions are some of the other activities that are being efficiently carried out on a day to day basis by such firms.

The current industry trends shows us that, most of the things that are being outsourced by a company usually makes business process outsourcing stand out of the given rest. Hence, business process outsourcing stands to be one of the major segments in the entire outsourcing market. It is there to deliver whenever your business needs a boost.

Benefits of hiring a BPO:

By outsourcing the back office operations to the major third world destinations, most companies will be able to get huge cost cuts. Bestowing some of their business operations on the third party outsourcing vendors help companies to concentrate on the core activities leaving behind the worries of certain peripheral activities.

With the help of outsourcing, the BPO vendors will be able to offer better customer satisfaction thereby leading to the customer retention, increased profitability, customer retention and more. Industry reports suggest that by means of outsourcing the business processes to the countries like China, Philippines and India, most companies will be able to enjoy a cut on the operational costs thereby resulting in huge profits.

There is doubt why business process outsourcing is so much hyped. These days, most organizations, no matter how much big or small they are, have learnt about the growing advantages of outsourcing in their own business operations. These companies are on its way taking a huge dive into this industry. Getting started?

Are you planning to try out your hands in this BPO wave? If yes, then you require formulating some effective plans. Get to understand your own vision together with your long term objectives. Following next will be your decision to find out the exact BPO destination and the most significantly on the vendor so that you can travel a long way ensuring smooth operations and good returns from the entire process.