What is Business Process Management (BPM)?

In most businesses, managing business processes is a significant issue. Many business owners believe it is too costly or worthwhile for massive procedures. BPM is essential for every size of business. Here’s a step-by-step guide to automating the management of your company processes with the aid of automation.

What is Business Process Management (BPM)?

Business process management (BPM) method means a firm takes a step back and examines all of these procedures as a whole and individually. It investigates the current condition and identifies areas for improvement to create a more efficient and effective firm.

Business process management (BPM) includes creating, editing, and analyzing pre-existing business processes.

Many departments in a business are responsible for taking raw material or data and turning it into something else. Each department may have dozens of core procedures that it handles.

When should businesses apply Business Process Management?

Here are some BPM applications that will provide a significant return on investment.

Changes in finance or privacy regulations necessitate continuous processes that must be regulated, such as a shift in customer data management following changes in financial or privacy rules.
Processes that are complex and need orchestration and coordination across multiple business units, divisions, functional departments, or workgroups.
Important performance metrics that can be measured and improved.
Processes that require one or more legacy applications for completion
Business processes with exceptional circumstances that must be handled manually or immediately.

Steps of a BPM lifecycle

Step 1: Design

Organizations generally use a number of processes to gather data and process it. Create your form and figure out who will be responsible for each activity in the workflow.

Step 2: Model

Create a visual layout of the procedure. Details like deadlines and conditions should be addressed to provide a clear picture of the sequence of events and data flow through the process.

Step 3: Execute

Make sure to test the procedure live with a small group and open it up to everyone. Make sure that critical information is secure.

Step 4: Monitor

Keep an eye on the procedure as it goes through the workflow. To ensure that process monitoring is completed effectively, use the proper metrics to identify progress, efficiency, and bottlenecks.

Step 5: Optimize

Keep your eyes and ears open for changes in your form or procedure that may be made to make them more efficient. Consider process improvement measures in the business sector.

Types of Business Process Management

BPM systems may be categorized into three types based on their purpose. The following are the three types of business process management:

Integration

A BPM system of this kind effectively manages procedures that frequently cross your current systems (e.g., HRMS, CRM, ERP) without much human input. Integration-centric business process management systems feature a wide range of connections and API access to develop processes that move quickly.

Human

Human-centric BPM applies to those activities that people primarily carry out. These processes frequently have a lot of authorizations and chores completed by individuals. These platforms provide a pleasant user experience, easy alerts, and quick tracking.

Document

When a document (like a contract or agreement) is at the center of the process, business process management solutions are required. They allow routing, formatting, verification, and signing as tasks move through the workflow.

What can you benefit from Business Process Management?

BPM solutions help to improve an organization’s value by improving processes, which has some advantages. The following are a few examples:

Increased efficiency and cost savings

BPM systems improve existing procedures and add more structure to creating new processes. It accomplishes this by eliminating process redundancies and bottlenecks, resulting in higher efficiency and productivity.

Businesses may reach their intended business goals at a quicker pace with more agility, and they may direct any extra resources to more high-value work.

Enhanced employee and customer experience

A BPM suite of solutions aids in the reduction of repetitive labor and making knowledge more accessible. Employees may focus on their job and clients, enhancing customer satisfaction. Transparent processes also reduce the learning curve within employee onboarding, promoting efficiency and engagement.

More scalable processes

Because BPM improves process execution and workflow automation, it can be easily transplanted across regions worldwide. Business process management solutions may clarify roles, ensure consistency throughout the procedure, and offer a platform for adding business rules for automating processes, allowing teams to concentrate on innovation.

Greater transparency

This allows for greater transparency and accountability throughout a process since it establishes clear owners for activities along the way. It encourages collaboration among teams.

Less dependency on development teams

BPM’s low-code functions remove any potential dependencies on development, allowing you to deploy your project quickly and with minimal concern. Business users can be educated rapidly and easily on these products, resulting in process automation throughout the organization.

Some Business Process Management examples

Human resources: BPM software can help HR departments be more efficient by, for example, making time sheets easier to evaluate. Onboarding new employees is another HR sector where BPM may help speed up the many procedures involved. It eliminates paper forms when automated document-centric HR activities are used across a corporation.

Finance: Finance teams must deal with various paperwork from system-centric and human-centric processes. They receive many emails and paper forms regarding the company’s internal and external financial procedures.

A BPM platform, for example, allows finance departments to handle employee travel requests more quickly. It can also minimize purchasing procedures.

Sales: Sales teams must also navigate a variety of human- and machine-centric procedures. Sales quotation and invoice processing can be streamlined using BPM solutions.

Content distribution: BPM may be used by media organizations to automate the production and delivery of content, from creation to distribution. A business process management system can be created to communicate with content management, rights administration, content traffic, and work order systems.

Customer service: Customer service staff may use knowledge of frequently asked questions to build a list of answers for chatbots to handle, saving the team time when there are a lot of customer service requests.

Transcripted data from call centers and chatbots can also be used to automate procedures and reveal more personalized responses for consumers.

Banking: When banks evaluate borrowers for possible credit risk, they must go through documents. This involves gathering data from various sources, including the applicants, employers, and credit agencies.

BPM improves loan approval rates by managing the flow of information throughout the process and reducing document mistakes.

Business Process Automation (BPA) vs. Business Process Management (BPM)

Business process automation (BPA) and BPM are related, but they’re different. Automating processes is the goal of BPA, but managing processes is the goal of BPM, which may or may not include automation. Simply stated, all BPA is considered a kind of BPM, whereas not all BPM contains BPA.

Any technique used to automate business processes is referred to as BPA. It might be used for various purposes, ranging from productivity increases to agility, efficiency, and compliance improvements in day-to-day corporate activities.

BPA’s advantages may be seen in a variety of processes. For example, consider the following:

Employee onboarding and offboarding
Vacation requests
HR requests
Expense filing
New equipment requests
IT support requests

Automation-ready business processes are usually those that are initiated as a result of a particular, triggering occurrence. For example, the completion of an expense report may lead to the execution of a pre-determined series of activities culminating in reimbursement being credited to an employee’s bank account.

On the other hand, BPM is a comprehensive strategy for improving business procedures. When it succeeds, everyone better understands how they contribute to the organization’s goals. This usually results in a more cheerful, productive staff that makes happier clients and lower expenses.

The future trend of Business Process Management

BPM – a methodical technique for improving business processes – is not a new field, but it is evolving, fueled by the changing way work and business are conducted in today’s world.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses of all sizes have been forced to reconsider their processes for achieving business objectives because of the high prevalence of digital technology, necessitating companies to operate in a digital marketplace and forcing them to incorporate remote work.

The BPM industry has changed to meet these new demands. The following is a brief rundown of the emerging trends in BPM:

The accessibility of citizen developer tools propels BPM’s democratization, allowing more people across the company to discover, implement, and evaluate new methods for process improvement.
By combining AI, machine learning, and RPA into workflows, business process automation is enhancing process efficiency.
With major software vendors adding BPM capabilities to business applications, the influence of BPM concepts and technology is being extended.
Process mining tools have made it much simpler for businesses to build an accurate picture of a process’s activities and how they may be optimized. As more procedure steps go online, the manual labor previously done by people — and captured in BPM through interviews and observation — will be able to be mapped and optimized automatically.
The ability to do iterative process modeling in real-time will considerably enhance the flexibility of process automation.
BPM will become a competitive differentiator for businesses, as the process of using BPM to enhance and optimize the front-end business processes that interact with staff and consumers becomes more widespread.

Conclusion

The best businesses recognize that as the world moves, they must change. Technology is progressing rapidly, and business processes are growing more complex. So, it’s critical to have a comprehensive BPM plan that keeps operations automated, consistent, and running smoothly as your organization grows.

The appropriate framework in place — business processes that will help you achieve your goals — is critical for growth. Get it right with your company process management tools, and your organization will function like a well-oiled machine.

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