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Processes are the bread and butter of business – from delivering packages to paying invoices to reviewing timesheets.
According to Gartner, “Business process management (BPM) is a discipline that uses various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve and optimize business processes.” Furthermore, “Though not required, technologies are often used with BPM. BPM is key to align IT/OT investments to business strategy.”
One of BPM’s main drivers of growth is the pursuit of operational excellence. Indeed, the global BPM market value is expected to reach $65.8 billion by 2032. Increasingly, companies are leveraging BPM to optimize processes and reduce costs.
According to a survey by Celonis, 83% of leaders stated that processes are their “greatest lever for value” and “fastest lever for change”. However, only 1 in 2 business-critical processes are optimized. Barriers to process excellence include legacy technology, process complexity, siloed data, and limited improvement opportunities.
Business process management, when implemented correctly, can help lower or remove these barriers. In this article, Silverskills explores what BPM is and why it is crucial for companies to remain competitive.
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BPM is composed of several stages that work together to create a continuous loop of improvement.
BPM helps organizations to respond more quickly to customer demands, business objectives, and market changes.
The business world today is dynamic and complex, and will only become more so in the future.
BPM’s organized approach to managing processes enhances work quality and operational efficiency, which are the main reasons companies implement it. A well-implemented BPM program can reduce waste, minimize errors, accelerate digital transformation, improve compliance, save time, lower costs, boost agility, and ultimately lead to better products and services for customers.
Some of the primary benefits of BPM include the following.
More Scalable Processes: BPM improves process execution and workflow automation, making it easier to scale operations across different regions. Furthermore, business process management tools provide clarity on roles, thus ensuring consistency, and help unearth opportunities for automating business rules.
Enhanced Agility and Flexibility: In today’s rapidly changing, sometimes unpredictable business environment, companies need to be adaptable and flexible. BPM helps organizations to respond more quickly to customer demands, business objectives, and market changes.
By continuously monitoring and optimizing business processes, companies can pivot and adjust their operations to align with new priorities.
For example, during periods of market disruption or uncertainty, companies with effective BPM systems are better equipped to quickly adapt and maintain operations, ensuring business continuity and minimizing downtime.
Increased Cost Savings and Efficiency: BPM systems help simplify existing processes and provide structure for creating new ones. By reducing redundancies and bottlenecks, they enhance efficiency and productivity. Additionally, with greater agility, businesses can achieve goals more quickly and reallocate surplus resources to other high-priority tasks.
Enhanced Employee and Customer Experience: BPM tools reduce repetitive tasks and make information more accessible, allowing employees to focus on their work and customers. This leads to improved customer satisfaction.
Moreover, BPM helps businesses better understand customer needs and pain points, which can drive the development of more personalized and responsive offerings.
Clear workflows also shorten the onboarding process for new employees.
Less Dependency on Development Teams: BPM’s low-code capabilities reduce reliance on development teams. Business users can quickly adopt these tools, increasing process automation across the organization.
Greater Transparency:BPM clearly defines task ownership, improving transparency and accountability throughout the process. This encourages better communication and collaboration among teams.
Improved Regulatory Compliance: BPM can help companies ensure that they adhere to relevant industry regulations by providing transparency, documentation, and consistent procedures.
Often, BPM tools include features that help track and audit processes, making it easier to maintain compliance with standards such as GDPR, ISO certifications, or industry-specific regulations.
BPM applications can be used across various departments within an organization to improve and streamline processes. Here are some examples of how BPM helps achieve business objectives:
Supply Chain Management: BPM can improve the efficiency and transparency of supply chain management by automating key tasks such as order processing, inventory management, procurement, and vendor communications.
With BPM, organizations can track shipments in real time, optimize supplier relationships, reduce stockouts, and quickly address any issues in the supply chain. Automation of manual tasks such as order entry and invoicing also helps to reduce errors and operational costs.
Human Resources: BPM software enhances HR efficiency by simplifying the onboarding process for new hires and automating tasks such as timesheet reviews. Furthermore, it reduces the reliance on paper forms by automating document-centric HR tasks, making the process faster and more efficient.
Finance: In finance departments, BPM helps manage large volumes of documents, including emails and paper forms related to financial processes. For instance, BPM platforms can streamline purchasing workflows and accelerate the processing of employee travel requests.
Furthermore, BPM allows companies to create templates for standardized purchase order submissions, speeding up the procurement of business software and hardware. Customized workflows can also be established for unique purchasing scenarios.
Sales: Sales teams handle both human- and system-centric processes. BPM tools can streamline the exchange of sales quotes and invoices, reducing sales cycle times and improving workflow efficiency.
Customer Service: BPM helps customer service teams by automating responses to frequently asked questions through chatbots, freeing up agents during high service request volumes. Additionally, transcript data from call centers and chatbots can help automate further processes and provide more personalized customer support.
Banking: When evaluating loan applicants, banks collect data from multiple sources, including applicants, employers, and credit agencies. BPM speeds up the loan eligibility decision-making process by reducing errors in documentation and managing the flow of information.
As BPM has evolved, various best practices have been developed to help keep it on course for businesses. Here are 5 of them:
Involve Key Stakeholders from the Get-Go: To ensure that BPM initiatives are effective, involve stakeholders from various departments (such as HR, finance, IT, and operations) from the planning and design stages. Engaging stakeholders early helps to identify pain points, gather insights, and ensure that all perspectives are considered when designing processes. It also helps with smoother implementation and adoption across the organization.
Consider BPM a Business Project Rather than a Tech Project: While technology tools, such as BPM software, are essential for automating and optimizing workflows, the primary value of BPM lies in improving business operations. Ensure that your BPM efforts are closely aligned with your company’s strategic objectives.
By focusing on business outcomes, such as increasing customer satisfaction, reducing costs, or improving efficiency, BPM becomes a tool for achieving long-term success rather than just a set of isolated tasks.
By focusing on business outcomes […] BPM becomes a tool for achieving long-term success rather than just a set of isolated tasks.
This approach ensures that people, processes, and technology all work together toward achieving long-term business success.
Utilize Simulation Modeling: Simulation modeling allows businesses to visualize how changes in processes may impact overall performance. By testing different process variations through simulation, organizations can predict outcomes and identify potential issues before implementing changes.
Create Interdisciplinary Teams: To optimize BPM, it is important to involve people from different disciplines and departments in the process design and improvement stages.
Interdisciplinary teams bring diverse perspectives and expertise, helping to identify issues that may not be apparent from a single department’s viewpoint.
Map and Document Existing Processes: Before optimizing or reengineering processes, it is essential to map and document current workflows. This helps in understanding how processes function today, where inefficiencies or bottlenecks exist, and what can be improved.
BPM is no longer just a nice-to-have concept; it has become a necessity for companies striving to remain competitive and meet the demands of the modern business world.
In a marketplace where speed, adaptability, and innovation are key to success, BPM offers a framework for companies to navigate change and deliver value to both customers and stakeholders.
Silverskills provides business process management services for sustainable growth. For over 20 years, we have been transforming processes for Fortune 500 companies and agile SMEs in healthcare, commercial real estate, finance, and other industries.
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