This Simple Yet Powerful Tool Can Take Your Business to the Next Level

How do you get your business to the next level? Whether big or small, business strategy is at the forefront of the executive team’s focus. It starts with a business analysis of each area in the business that has an impact, identifying which is necessary for growth and the cost it will take to get there. The path to growth needs a rock-solid foundation to build on, starting with the technology and business systems you have right now. To navigate this journey effectively, consider leveraging a strategic tool like a business roadmap, which provides a clear and structured plan for identifying key focus areas and implementing targeted improvements.

Define the Functionality and Systems Your Business Needs

What functionality and systems does your business have and do they need to be improved with customizations, or completely overhauled to better fit your strategy for growth? Do you have too many business systems or not enough or could you benefit from integration or implementing a new system or technology that checks all the boxes? Put another way, what value do your current systems and tools bring and what impact do they have, and most importantly, do they align with your business strategy for growth? 

All of these are important questions to answer to get a high-level view of your business roadmap. The following are important areas of value to identify for each area of functionality or business system: 

• Revenue opportunities
• Efficiency and automation
• Self-service
• Data Accuracy
• Compliance
• Preventative Maintenance
• Reduction of defects

Determine the Value Each Functionality or System Brings

Once you break out all of the vital areas of focus within your business, it’s time to identify the value each function — and the systems behind it — brings to the table.  A business roadmap tool guides you through this process, leveraging your data to create the much-needed context for every core aspect of your business.

Increasing the ROI from each function comes later. This step involves determining the overall value and identifying which systems are crucial to your business. For some, compliance takes precedence. For others, the rest of the business is downstream from creating efficient self-service portals for customers to have a frictionless and positive user experience that encourages them to spend.

Once these functions and systems are fully defined, your roadmap will guide you and your team towards improvements. Specify which systems can change to increase efficiency and determine the time and effort required to implement those changes.

The Impact of Taking, Or Not Taking, Improvements Forward

Once the business analysis is complete and all of the improvements have their place on the business roadmap — the actual process of refining your business begins. Ideas that sound good in isolation are now placed in a high-level context to see how they hold up against the bigger picture of your business. The temptation to take action for action’s sake diminishes because you now possess a comprehensive map of every reaction that those decisions would cause.

You can then measure the impact of taking an action forward, or the impact if that improvement is not taken forward, and compare which is more important for business strategy and growth. Or see which improvements are more urgent, and which can be done at a later time down the road. Having this data allows you to make better business decisions and can help uncover potential inefficiencies you may be unaware of. For example, you may discover two systems that overlap in functionality and could benefit from integration. 

This step is where you see the real ROI opportunities based on the data collected from the business analysis of the functionality, systems, and processes you already have. 

The Business Roadmap: Visually Identify Functions and Their Value in Your Business

So, how do you maximize your ROI once you’ve completed a business analysis that identifies all of the core functionalities and plans for improvement? By continuously making adjustments and examining the output through a straightforward visual presentation. Utilizing a business roadmap is not a one-and-done thing. It’s a tool that can be used over and over again to ensure your business stays at the forefront of its needs. 

5P Consulting’s Business Value Roadmap is a tool backed by the Lean Six Sigma approach and designed to make the business analysis process easy and includes pre-built graphs that instantly communicate the impact of each change. The tool provides the clarity you need to identify a genuinely efficient, ROI-focused path forward.

This tool is something we use with our own clients and provides the clarity that is needed to move forward efficiently and make a big impact on each of our clients. 

Are you ready to discover and make the most of the hidden ROI opportunities in your business? Download the roadmap below, and check out this short video we created to get you started with the Business Value Roadmap tool today! As always, we are here to help so if you have any questions reach out to us.