A regional janitorial services firm wanted to begin its digital transformation journey to increase its competitiveness and profitability. Since its founding, the firm has expanded to multiple service lines in multiple cities and enjoys a high level of customer satisfaction.

Despite its growth and success, the firm's reliance on email, paper, and spreadsheets was beginning to bury the back-office staff with manual processing  and follow-up tasks. Also, several senior staff members have a wealth of operational and customer knowledge that was not captured anywhere and therefore was not shareable.

The firm needed to answer these questions:

• What are our weakest areas, and which fixes could have the greatest impact?

• Where is the "low hanging fruit" for improving our business?

• How can we get a thorough, rapid survey of all our functional areas to catalog all our processes?

• How can we "know what we don't know?"

The ProcessBucket solution was implemented within six weeks. This gave the firm complete visibility into everything they do with a catalog of 300+ total processes across their five functional areas (listed using the acronym H-FOAM):

• Human Resources: background checks, compensation, onboarding, training, unemployment claims, recruiting, hiring, workers comp, uniforms
  
• Finance: A/R, A/P, payroll, filings, taxes, reporting, budgeting
  
• Operations & Customer Support: customer services, inventory, equipment, purchasing, scheduling, inspections
  
• Administration: IT, office, vehicles, phones
  
• Marketing & Sales: prospecting, bids, pricing, outbound marketing, inbound marketing, SEO/website
  

The ProcessBucket solution provides a way to organize process details, process documentation, role (job) descriptions, and a list of upcoming tasks.

Process descriptions: Across the firm, processes were identified that captured every activity by every staff member. This included both recurring/scheduled processes (such as a monthly reporting deadline) and also as-needed processes (such as responding to an unplanned emergency). Each process is described by its functional area, subarea, owner, assignee, frequency, software used, priority, and supporting documentation. 

Documentation access: Existing (and new) documentation is linked to its corresponding process for quick access.

Role descriptions: Every process is assigned to a role within the firm, so anyone stepping into that role has immediate access to their list of assigned processes.

Task calendar: A master calendar shows all the tasks generated from all the recurring processes.

With complete visibility into each process performed by everyone at the firm, this janitorial services firm saw benefits from increased revenue, reduced costs, and lower risk.

More revenue

♦ More leads. An effective lead generation method was used in one city but not another. Now that method is shared and generating more revenue in the second city. 

♦ New projects. They found the process for bidding and winning add-on work to be cumbersome. Now an automated system produces more revenue from these types of extra projects.

Lower costs

♦ Shared skills.  Multiple staff members can "divide and conquer" larger projects since there is a standard playbook for high-cost processes.  This approach balances the workload, removes unevenness, maximizes staff utilization, increases consistency, and lowers labor costs. 

♦ Faster forms. Since they now have an exhaustive list of every form used throughout the firm, they could evaluate which forms took the most time to fill out and route. The most-used forms have moved online, increasing speed and reducing the cost of handling paper. 

♦ Streamlined approvals. Every required approval has been linked to the corresponding process. They eliminated some unnecessary approvals to save time, and other approvals are candidates for workflow automation.

♦ Appropriate apps. The value of each piece of software is evaluated based on how well it supports an existing process. A low-cost app was added that greatly simplified an aspect of the business. They identified several apps that had a high cost and high risk. These apps will be replaced with new components that are tightly integrated into the core technology stack.

♦ Faster training. Since each Role now has a list of all its assigned processes, it takes just seconds to find a list of everything that someone in that Role should be working on. Each Role also has a list of all the upcoming tasks based on the processes assigned to that Role.

Less Risk

♦ Stranded knowledge. The valuable knowledge and techniques of the most experienced staff members can now be shared, refined, and standardized throughout the firm.

♦ Trackable tasks. Every recurring task is calendared and tracked, based on the schedule of its parent process. Now there is less risk of missing an important deadline.

♦ Known vulnerabilities. Now that every process has been identified, described, and cataloged, they can see all the single-points-of-failure and take steps to mitigate the risk of each of those critical processes.

Looking Ahead

With a complete catalog of all its processes, the firm has a good-sized "to-do list" of specific ways to improve and drive better results for its customers, staff, and owners. In the months and years to come, the firm can set clear objectives for becoming leaner and develop a culture of continuous improvement: 

Potential Process Improvement Projects that were uncovered or clarified by ProcessBucket:

• scale-up sales with more teams covering new specialties and geographies
• automate repetitive processes
• remove overlap and refine best practices based on the processes owned by the firm's experts
• capture staff and customer feedback in a more systematic way
• move selected tasks to online and mobile
• upgrade specific core software components
• add analytics and AI tools