Business process management (BPM) is a method for managing your business processes—and taking care of your processes can make or break your business.
Still not sure what we mean? It's ok; we'll explain everything you need to know here: from what BPM is to how to successfully implement BPM in your company.
What is BPM, and how does it work?
Business Process Management (BPM) is an approach to help you at work: a set of tools and techniques to analyze, design, execute, monitor, and improve business processes.
The idea is to support businesses in having visibility of what is going on and understanding how to make it better. For that, BPM works by breaking down a business process into its tasks and activities, then mapping out the process flow and analyzing it for potential improvements.
The goal is to streamline operations, improve efficiency, and increase the overall effectiveness of an organization. To do so, BPM involves the following steps:
- Identifying processes: Recognize the processes to map and pay special attention to those that need improvement or can be automated.
- Mapping or redesigning: Create or redesign processes, taking into account the company's goals and objectives.
- Executing: Start using the new or improved processes and integrate them into existing workflows.
- Monitoring: Track the performance of the processes, following metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate effectiveness.
- Getting better: Continuously analyze every process to make necessary adjustments to optimize their performance and achieve desired results.
What are the benefits of implementing BPM in my organization?
Implementing BPM in any organization can bring many benefits, such as:
Increased efficiency: By streamlining processes and eliminating bottlenecks and unnecessary steps, BPM can help organizations have more time and resources, which improves productivity.
Improved customer satisfaction: Organizations can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by ensuring that processes are improved and completed quickly.
Enhanced quality: The same logic applies here, as standardizing processes and implementing best practices lead to higher-quality results.
Greater agility: BPM enables organizations to adapt to changing market conditions so that they can respond more quickly to market moves and customer needs.
Better visibility: With a clear view of processes and their performance, you have more control over business processes and can make better-informed decisions.
Cost reduction: Optimized processes and resource allocation help reduce operational costs by eliminating redundant tasks and activities.
Greater employee satisfaction: No more getting lost at work. Clearer processes make everyone's day better, increasing job satisfaction and employee productivity.
Examples of BPM benefits
Need more specific examples of the benefits of implementing BPM at your business? Here they are:
- Improved order processing: By automating and streamlining order processing, you can reduce errors and delays, resulting in faster order fulfillment and happier customers.
- Better inventory management: With BPM applied to optimize inventory management processes, you can reduce inventory carrying costs and ensure your company has the right products in stock to meet customer demand.
- Reduced time-to-market: A straightforward process will enhance product development and enable new products to come to life/market faster. Talk about a competitive edge!
- Increased compliance for financial institutions: With BPM, processes are designed to comply with regulations and standards, and you can reduce the risk of fines.
- Speed via standardization: Regardless of the kind of business you work for, standardizing your processes with BPM will make things move faster.
What are some common challenges in implementing BPM?
Surely a change like implementing BPM will make waves. That's why it's essential to know what kind of bumps you might encounter:
- Lack of understanding or buy-in from leadership
- Time and resource constraints
- Difficulty in identifying the right processes to focus on
- Not knowing how to measure the success of the implementation
- Team resistance in changing existing processes and procedures
What are the critical steps to successful BPM implementation?
Ok, we told you the challenges that lie ahead; now let's talk about how to overcome them and implement BPM successfully:
Gain stakeholder support: Build alliances. Ensure that leaders support the BPM initiative and understand its importance. This helps secure the necessary resources and drives change throughout the organization.
Establish a clear vision: BPM is about visibility and needs to be that way from the get-go. Define the goals and objectives to have a roadmap for the project and ensure everyone is aligned.
Put together a cross-functional team: Form a diverse group of individuals with expertise in multiple areas to make sure the implementation goes smoothly. This will give you a comprehensive understanding of the organization. You could include HR, IT, process experts, and a process user, for example.
After deciding the team and the roadmap, this is the path to actually start the process of implementing BPM in your organization:
Identify processes: The first step in BPM implementation is to identify the processes most critical to the company's success and prioritize them for improvement.
Analyze processes: Before starting any changes, each process must be analyzed in detail to find inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and other areas for improvement.
(Re)design processes: Based on the analysis, processes should be redesigned to improve performance. New processes might need to be created.
Implement changes: After processes have been redesigned and the team is happy with the outcome, changes should be implemented, which may involve using software tools or other technologies, like aworkflow platform.
Monitor performance: This is a big project, so you need to make sure it's evolving properly. Monitor changes to check whether they are performing as expected and identify further improvement areas.
And now you're all set! Just remember that implementing BPM gives you a source of continuous improvement. The monitoring and improving part is always ongoing. This also means this tool supports even better results over time.
