A company without systems is a company without a compass in the jungle. Implementing business systems to help you and your employees accomplish the tasks is key to ensuring your business grows.

If you want a high-potential company, you must create systems on which the whole work will depend. Your company is a system that requires subsystems to operate normally.

How do you make a difference in running a business? The answer is simple: You implement systems! The good news is that by using a proven 8-step process, anyone can turn their organization into a machine for generating profits!

You are an entrepreneur, and one of your responsibilities is to manage the businesses if you want to grow. On the other hand, managing, in simplest words, can be presented as systematizing all business activities that your business must accomplish to ensure that your company will deliver value to the customers.

Today, we will review the most important steps in implementing systems to help you run your business more effectively and efficiently.

So, let’s start by explaining what the system means so you can start creating standard operating procedures.

Key Terms Related to Business System Implementation?

Most businesses today are organized by their business functions. These business functions can include operations, sales and marketing, finance, etc. However, each business function has its own systems and processes.

For example, your marketing function will have different processes, such as a market research system, lead generation system, content marketing system, advertising system, etc. So, the business function alone can not achieve its goals without business systems.

Let’s look at the key terms related to implementing business systems in your company.

What is a System?

A system is a set of interrelated and interdependent elements that function and exist to transform inputs in the system into outputs.

We can notice several things from these words:

• First, it is a set of two or more elements. We cannot say that we have a system without at least two elements, and these elements are subsystems.
• Second, these elements are interrelated between them. What does this mean? Elements in the system are connected so that the output from one element simultaneously can be input into another element. The output from the last element is the result of the system or, said, the purpose of the system’s existence.
• Third, the elements are interdependent. The elements in the system are dependent on each other. If one element has problems, this can easily cause disorder in other elements.
• Fourth, the purpose of the elements is to achieve the system’s goal. They must have a logical goal of producing the desired output, which the functionality of all elements can accomplish.

What are Business Systems?

Conversely, a business system is a set of interrelated and interdependent processes that transform inputs into outputs to achieve specific business goals covered inside your business strategy.

So, each business system is specifically designed to connect specific parts of an organization to work together for a common goal.

Remember that your business systems and processes are the essential building blocks of a company. Together with human resources, they are the most important contributors to your business’s success.

What are the Subsystems of the Businesses?

For example, we can talk about continuous learning systems, competition monitoring, and communication with potential customers. All of these systems are only subsystems of your business as a whole. If you apply the systematic approach, continuous learning will be a subsystem of the business development subsystem. At the same time, the remaining three that I have mentioned here will be marketing subsystems. In this way, all the mentioned would look like this:

Do you now have a better picture of where subsystems belong and who is responsible for their application? Can we now see a bigger picture than previously? Indeed, yes, because we can see which departments are responsible for implementing specific activities to achieve the particular goals.

Why You Need to Have Subsystems?

If your goal as an entrepreneur is to build a successful system that will grow, you must apply some of the laws of nature to business. This law of nature is thinking in the form of systems.

Your business will need different elements, which will be subsystems. In some cases, problems in one of them can cause the collapse of the whole company.

Let’s take a car as an example. If there is a problem with the lubrication, this problem will cause a problem in the engine, and then your car will lose functionality – to transport you from one place to another.

The answer is simple: Start to systematize your business. Yes, your job as an entrepreneur is to organize your business. This is easy to answer but much harder to implement. So, I will try to simplify this with several implementation steps.

Developing Business Systems – Step-by-Step Process

To start using systems approach, you must first build systems in your business. Here is a step-by-step process that will help you build systems and ensure your will have a healthy business.

1. What are the goals of your business?

Always start with your business goals. So, the first question you need to respond to is what you want to achieve with your business system.

Your business goals will be the basis for your business processes. It’s all about what you want to accomplish and why you want to accomplish it. Without a clear and realistic sense of your business goals, you’ll likely find yourself chasing your tail, trying to get somewhere. What is worse is that in such a case, you will start building a specific business process that will not help you achieve your business goals.

If you want to sell products and services to final customers, ask yourself what you must do to achieve this goal. Do you need to produce or buy those products? We can already figure out four possible main elements: marketing, production, research and development, and supply.

Now, you must ask several questions:

• How can I produce the products and services I want?
• Or how I can use research and development?
• How can I supply these products and services to the final customer?

These answers will start shaping all the necessary elements as subsystems of your company.

Next, after you have a finished product, you need to sell it to customers. For this purpose, you need the following elements: marketing, sales, and finances. Again, here, we must answer several questions:

• How can I market my products?
• How can I sell them?
• Or how can I collect payment?

2. Set Key Performance Indicators for Each Goal

Now, when you already have goals for each important system, you must work with your team and brainstorm ways to measure its performance.

For example, in the research and development system, you can set a key performance indicator (KPI) for the number of new products developed in a year. This will help you track the efficiency and progress of your R&D efforts.

Similarly, for a marketing system, you can set KPIs such as the number of new leads generated for the lead generation subsystem, website traffic, or social media engagement to measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.

3. Define all important processes for each business function

This step is essential because every process needs to be defined. This includes how orders will be processed, how you will respond to a customer, how your business will fulfill procurement, etc.

Respond to these questions:

• What are the most critical processes for each function?
• What will each function need to do to bring you closer to your goals?
• How does each function currently work?

Answers to these questions will help you define the most critical processes for each function in your company.

4. Find dependencies and relationships between process elements

The idea here is to help you find connections between elements of your processes.

Dependencies and relationships are essential aspects of any workflow. Look at how each element is connected to the others. This helps you determine where you can optimize one part of your process without negatively impacting another part of your process.

For example, suppose the manufacturing department has to complete a specific step before the product can be shipped. In that case, we might have a relationship here. This is a simple example of dependency, but it illustrates a concept used in almost every process.

Place all elements you discover in the previous step on the paper in a hierarchical order. Look at them and note all possible relationships and dependencies between them.

Process maps are helpful tools for business system mapping out a process step-by-step so that the interdependencies and relationships between those steps become obvious..

5. Determine the activities inside all business processes for effective business systems

This is one of the most challenging activities you will have to do.

Determine all activities inside all processes with a brief description and place them near all identified subsystems.

One way to do this is to list the activities in a column on the left of a piece of paper. Next, describe each activity with a sentence or two describing what you are doing or who you are doing it with.

If you get it done right, you can write about it in the operating procedures documentation. This is very important for your business’s success. The team members and your manager should know what happens in all process subsystems.

6. Document your business system and all process activities in operating procedures

Operating procedures are written documents documenting all of your business’s process activities. Essentially, you are creating a step-by-step guide that, when used by your employees, will always deliver consistent results. When employees follow these operating procedures, they know what steps to take to perform a task or carry out a procedure.

It is important for all subsystems with all activities to be documented. This process will tell you precisely what your team members’ responsibilities are and what activities must be implemented. This documentation will produce working procedures for your company.

After documenting, you must test all of them to see if they bring results as planned. The purpose of testing is to find possible problems and solve them.

7. Train Your Employees

Now that you have documented systems, your work on building systems is not done yet. You must educate your team members on the new business system and ensure that responsible persons are clear on expectations with a well-documented system.

As you can see, your business system will help your team members responsible for the specific system have a better idea of what’s expected of them, both in terms of behavior and results.

8. Assign Tasks and Responsibilities

Before you start implementing your new systems and processes, you must create a management system assigning tasks and responsibilities. This will help you create accountability within your employees and ensure that everyone knows their role in the system. In this way, you will ensure a smooth transition to the new system.

You can also let your employees test the new system and try the new business process. If you ask them for their feedback and first impressions, you can find additional improvement opportunities before the implementation.

9. Implement your business system

This is crucial in getting your staff to buy into and support a new initiative.

Start with a meeting, explain the process, and then review the details. People may feel scared by the complexity of a process and the uncertainty of change. However, suppose you start by simply explaining what’s going to happen. In that case, it helps people understand the big picture, and the big picture will help them understand the details. Once the staff is on board with your plan, put processes in place to make your new approach work. Providing a training schedule, including online materials and a hands-on training session, is also helpful.

If you have not implemented these systems and they are only on paper, your effort will be in vain.

10. Track the implementation of operating procedures

Another important principle in the operating manual is “tracking.” This means keeping a record of everything you are trying to instill in your employees and holding them accountable for your outlined procedures. Without tracking, it is too easy for people to ignore your instructions or, worse, to do the opposite of what you have instructed. When this happens, chaos ensues, and your efforts to implement business systems fail.

Something important for your business is that systems will allow you to efficiently monitor your employees’ performances and find all possible improvements.

11. Improve your operating procedures

Improving operating procedures is a little-discussed tactic in direct response, but it’s very powerful. Operating procedures are the actions you take every day that ensure your business runs smoothly. Things like filing paperwork on time, sending email reminders, following up promptly on orders, and other “minor” tasks significantly impact your bottom line.

A key takeaway here is that you should improve your operating procedures. This is especially true if your current operating procedures are ineffective, inefficient, or outdated. You will always need to look for ways to improve your company’s operation, whether it’s simplifying how you do things, cutting out waste, or making yourself more efficient and productive.

Improvement is continuous and an integral part of any system.

Read more about the benefits of the implementation of the business systems.

How to Identify Improvement Opportunities for Your Business Processes?

When you have your business systems in place, you can easily identify improvement opportunities.

Here is what you must do for this purpose:

1. Monitor the Performance of Each Business System

You must continually monitor KPIs, analyze your current business processes, and compare the results with your KPIs. This will help you find possible bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your analyzed business system.

Remember to be proactive about checking your metrics and comparing them with revenue, net profit, sales leads, conversions, customer lifetime value, and customer satisfaction. This will help you identify a specific business process that can be improved.

2 Implement Business System Improvements

The second step is to identify improvement opportunities and start working on possible adjustments inside your business systems.

Implementing business systems is not something you can set up and forget. It is a continuous improvement process.

While good systems can help you achieve business growth, remember that bad systems can cause even the best employees to achieve underperforming results. As Dr. Edward Deming once said, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”