What is a business process audit?
A process audit is a close study of how work moves through a company. It follows a sample of recent leads, quotes, orders or jobs from start to finish and finds where they wait, get typed in twice or get lost. A good one puts a cost on each problem and ranks the fixes.
People call it many things, like an operations assessment, a process review or a systems audit. The useful ones have three things in common. They trace specific orders or jobs through the company. They measure what happens instead of only asking people. And they end with a plan you can act on.
At Push, our version is called the Friction Point Analysis. It grew out of our co-founder's TEDx talk, The Process of Creating a Process. The talk looks at how the steps inside a business get built.
How do you know if you need a process audit?
You probably need a process audit if teams blame each other when an order goes wrong, or if new software didn't fix the problem. Another sign is not knowing whether to fix the CRM, the ads or the process. All of these mean the problem sits between teams and systems, outside any one team's job.
Other signs are more specific. Quotes take days, and the reason is unclear. The same data gets typed into two systems. Leaders look at three different numbers for the same thing. Hiring more people hasn't made the work move faster. New tools get bought, then quietly ignored.
- Teams point at each other when something goes wrong.
- Software purchases haven't fixed the underlying problem.
- The same information is typed into more than one system.
- Reports disagree, and meetings go to arguing about the numbers.
- The founder or one key person is the bottleneck for decisions.
What does a process audit look at?
A good process audit looks at your systems, the data inside them and the people who use them. The systems show how work is supposed to flow. The data shows how it really flows, and the people explain why.
Systems usually include the CRM, the ERP, your online store, job or project tools, ad accounts and email. The auditor needs read-only access. Data means numbers like how many leads move from one step to the next and how long work sits at each step. It also covers how often details get re-typed, how many duplicates exist and why deals are lost. People means short interviews with sales, operations, finance and marketing.
Some audits also include a walk through the plant floor, warehouse or job site. Ours is done remotely, with access to your systems, your data and video calls.
What should you get at the end?
A process audit should end with a costed list of problems, a map of how work moves and a ranked plan for what to fix first. You should also get a meeting to walk through it with your leaders. An audit that ends with observations and no ranked plan isn't finished.
The initial analysis of a Friction Point Analysis has five parts. You get a problem list showing what each problem costs in hours and dollars a month. You get a score for each area, so you can re-check it later and see the change. You get a map from first lead to paid invoice, with the problems marked. You get a 90-day plan ranked by value and effort. And you get a readout meeting with your leadership team.
Ask any provider whether you keep the report if you don't hire them afterward. You should. With us, you do.
What does a process audit find?
A process audit usually finds a handful of problems that cost far more than anyone guessed. They almost always sit at handoffs, where work passes from marketing to sales, from sales to operations, or from one system to another. That's where work waits longest and gets lost most often.
In manufacturing, it's often quote requests waiting in an engineer's inbox, or quotes re-typed between the ERP and the CRM. In construction, it's bid invites that never got logged and a rough handoff from estimating to the field. For online stores, it's best sellers running out of stock, returns with no reason recorded, and ad platforms that disagree with Shopify.
The cost on each problem is what makes the list useful. A list of complaints is easy to ignore. A ranked list that puts hours and dollars a month on each delay tells you where to start.
How is a process audit different from value stream mapping?
Value stream mapping follows physical work on the shop floor, from raw material to finished goods. A process audit like ours follows information and decisions through your office systems, from first lead to invoice. They look at different parts of the same company and work well together.
Many manufacturers have done lean work on the floor and still struggle with quoting, order entry and sales follow-up. That's the office side of the business, and it's where a systems audit helps most. See our page on manufacturing for examples.
How long does a process audit take?
The first analysis in a focused process audit usually takes two to four weeks. Any shorter, and it's hard to follow enough orders or jobs from start to finish. The work that follows, like checking results and fixing processes, can run longer.
The initial analysis in our Friction Point Analysis usually takes 2 to 4 weeks, depending on how many systems and teams are involved. It's done remotely. Your team's part is small. We need access to your systems and about an hour on video with each person we interview.
How much does a process audit cost?
A process audit's cost depends on how many systems and teams are studied. Most providers quote the first analysis up front. Be careful with work billed by the hour that has no clear goal for each stage.
Our Friction Point Analysis is quoted phase by phase, after a free 30-minute call. The initial analysis fee is credited toward any work you start with us within 60 days. See how we set scope and price.
What happens after the audit?
After the audit, you act on the plan. You can use your own team, bring in outside help, or hire someone to lead it. The audit is only worth what you do with it.
Some clients run the plan themselves. Others keep going with us, since our Friction Point Analysis runs in phases. After the initial analysis come ongoing monitoring, process improvement and team training. That can include building fixes, like a HubSpot rebuild or better ad tracking. When the problem is priorities and follow-through more than systems, a fractional COO can drive the plan. When we reviewed a commercial oven manufacturer's HubSpot account, we found a backlog of leads that had never been called. The company then rebuilt its sales, design and service pipelines with us.
Written by the Push Analytics team.