Business Process Management: What is BPM?

 

Every business aims to lower expenses and increase income. Finding ways to achieve these goals can be frustrating, but a good place to start is your business processes. Examining your current business processes gives you a clear view of areas where you can improve for a more efficient and effective organization.

In this guide, we’ll look at how business process management can boost productivity, lower costs, and improve your organization’s ability to respond to problems. We’ll also cover common challenges to implementing new processes and how to overcome these obstacles.

 

What is Business Process Management?

 

In simple terms, business process management (BPM) refers to how a business defines, analyzes, and improves regular processes. A good BPM plan aims to make the business more efficient by reducing unnecessary processes and streamlining workflows.

This happens by taking a step back and analyzing existing processes for areas of improvement. It might also include building a framework to standardize processes throughout the organization. Services and business process management software make your process management solution easier to implement and change as needed.

 

Why Do Organizations Need to Manage Business Processes?

 

The most important reason to manage your business processes is to make a more streamlined and efficient business. Process management makes it possible to regularly analyze the way your business works and make updates that ultimately lead to lower expenses, higher productivity, and increased sales.

 

7 Benefits of Business Process Management

 

You’ll get more out of your business by creating a BPM plan to improve your existing processes and introduce new ones. The benefits of BPM include:

1. Employee Accountability: BPM includes assigning tasks to each employee. If a mistake is made or a task isn’t completed, it’s easy to narrow down where in the pipeline the mistake took place. This encourages your employees to take responsibility for their work and keeps teams accountable for their tasks.
2. Business Agility: Modern businesses need to be ready to make changes when the need arises. A BPM plan increases your organization’s agility so it can meet challenges head-on. If your market changes and you need to keep up, you can easily shift the processes that are affected by the change.
3. Regulation Compliance: Regulations and guidelines from government agencies and regulating bodies can change on short notice. A solid BPM strategy keeps you in compliance. You’ll be able to change processes to stay compliant and avoid hefty fees.
4. Increased Efficiency: One of the most important benefits of BPM is efficiency. An efficient business can easily take on new projects or analyze data to improve the organization. An increase in efficiency usually also leads to an increase in employee productivity.
5. Cross-Team Collaboration: Being able to share data, ideas, and reports between teams is essential to a streamlined business environment. Business process management software gives employees the tools they need to work directly with other teams, departments, and coworkers.
6. Cost Reduction: Your initial audit of business processes will likely reveal some processes and tasks that aren’t helping your business. Some of these obsolete processes could even be costing you money through the misuse of resources. Your BPM strategy helps eliminate unnecessary processes to reduce costs in the day-to-day management of your business.
7. Process Standardization: When you have multiple teams, departments, and offices all acting independently, you may end up with overlapping processes and less efficient systems. Process management creates a standardized process for each task and project in your organization. If someone leaves the business, their successor can pick up where they left off without the need to invent their own process for the task.

3 Business Process Management Challenges

 

Setting up a BPM strategy comes with challenges as well as benefits, such as:

1. Executive Buy-In: Your BPM plan can’t get very far without buy-in from the executive team. You’ll need to find a way to showcase the estimated cost reductions and revenue increases associated with implementation. Hiring a virtual CIO can help get reluctant executives on board.
2. Standardization: It’s difficult to create a central process and strategy when each team has its own way of doing things. Drawing pieces of your processes from different teams could help make the transition into a standard process easier.
3. Flexibility: Your initial strategy may not be the one you ultimately end up with. It’s often hard to put aside the ideas you had when creating your BPM strategy and pivot to more realistic or effective goals. You’ll need to be willing to shift goals as you identify different problems or more immediate needs.

Implementing a Business Process Management

 

Ready to implement a strong BPM strategy? Get a free consultation from the 5P team to help analyze your business and find the BPM plan that fits your needs today.