Work in Progress: An Introduction to Business Process Management

Business process management (BPM) relates to the analysis of internal company methods with the aim to improve efficiency, reduce costs, errors, and more. Successful implementation can elevate your team’s performance and lead to higher profitability at lower costs/effort. Here’s what you need to know in a nutshell.

Understanding Business Process Management

As a discipline, BPM uses various techniques in order to identify, model, deconstruct, measure, improve and optimize your company’s business processes. This can lead to changes in logistical operations that improve the efficiency of people, systems, information, and software to produce advantageous business outcomes. Often, modern strategies make use of data, using ongoing patterns or repetitive processes and analyzing these over the long term.

Often, creating the optimal business process means identifying unmanaged, chaotic actions such as wasted time, errors, over attribution of blame, lack of numerical data, demoralized employees, or poor logistical frameworks. 

Benefits of Business Process Management

By recognizing and addressing your company’s business processes, you can create a higher chance of success. Examples of this include:

• Improved adaptability - with the use of predictive analytics and established contingencies in place, companies can react with more agility to address problems or opportunities as they arise.

• Increased efficiency - at its core, BMP is about pinpointing inefficiencies and automating menial tasks to improve productivity and reduce the chance of error.

• Added security - for those working within areas of company security, BPM represents an opportunity to establish protocols that can safeguard private data, business assets and physical resources from loss or theft.

The possibilities for how BPM can benefit a company are limited only by your own ambitions and, often, it’s only by applying these methods to various divisions that you will begin to recognize their effects. 

Implementing Business Process Management

Once you have a good understanding of how BPM can benefit your business, it’s time to begin thinking about how it can be implemented. The first step for doing this is to identify your goals or, more strictly, your Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) and your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Changes to your processes will correspond with what you aim to achieve and how you intend to measure achievement.

It’s important to highlight the potential advantages of these changes to your team in order to ensure management and employee buy-in. The success of a BPM strategy is contingent on the compliance of the people within its relevance - if no one is enacting the proposed changes then it will be difficult to gauge their success. When presenting your strategy, place extra emphasis on the ways in which it benefits the people it affects, both in time and efficiency. 

Business Process Management Software

When it comes to monitoring the performance of an introduced BPM strategy, it’s important to find the right tools. BPM is an ongoing, long-term operation and you want to make sure you’re constantly analyzing its effectiveness and acting on new information to improve outputs. Before downloading any new programs, be sure to check out reviews or take advantage of free demos when they’re available.

Conclusion

For many working in industry, Business Process Management represents a novel concept and it might feel contrived to focus so intently on internal structures, but the effects are there to see and you have more to gain by learning about and looking to improve your way of work.