There are, however, several best-practices you could follow. (Thanks to Nick Greene at Tallify for the first 5 on this list).

• Pick the right metrics for comparison – you’d want to compare your new process to the old one in terms of efficiency, so you can empirically know whether it’s better or not.
• Work with the field-level employees. Chances are, they might have some input on what you could improve on.
• Think long-term & account for error. In some cases, your solution works wonders in the short-term, but prove to be inefficient or costly long-term.
• Define the exact scope of changes. You should know exactly what impact your solution will have, or you’ll be opening up to risk you could have avoided.
• Perform risk analysis. You can never predict the outcome at a 100% accuracy. You’d want to account for anything that can go wrong. The manufacturing methodology, for example, might seem to work wonders initially – right up to the point when it completely breaks down due to some minor oversight.
• Always consider automation for your business processes. This removes menial labor from your employee’s workloads, which leads to high productivity with employees working more on what matters. For example, instead of having your office admin chasing supervisors around for approval of notes or documents get a system that automatically routes notes for approval. Another example is having incident reports route automatically to identified QA staff. Well-chosen value-added automation that is apt for the task works out cheaper than staff every time and those staff can be moved to more intellectually stimulating activities in the company. It is important to note that the adoption technology will demand a change in your processes. Even if you have a software program developed solely for your company there will still have to be changes in work processes for optimal integration.
• Standardize your employees workflow processes as much as possible. Again this is easier to do and oversee with the use of automation. Workflow software ensures that everyone completes every step of the process in the right order and makes it easy to identify tardy staff and outliers.
• Incorporate the ability to track and analyze processes, deadlines and other key quality metrics. Find out if there are industry standards related to specific activities eg quality standards, net profits or mission-critical priorities. Also compare your own company-specific year on year data eg 2018 metrics compared to 2019. Once more, this is easier with software as manual tracking is inefficient and prone to error.