What is BPM?
Business Process Management (BPM) is a control tool that managers can use to help their organizations remain competitive and continuously provide value to customers by identifying and eliminating non-value steps. BPM makes sure that processes are being performed effectively and improves transparency and quality.
The various phases of BPM
- Strategic analysis. This phase sets the foundation for a BPM venture. Use this phase to decide what the organization wants out of the process.
- Process clarification & analysis. Management is assigned to the process and creates a team to lead the project.
- New process creation. Review problems identified in existing processes and work on new processes to replace these.
- New process implementation. This phase can be performed in two ways. Systemic, using software technology. Or non-systemic, without using BPM software tools.
- Control phase. This final phase involves monitoring process performance by collecting and analyzing data to see if the efficiencies put in place are working. In this phase, look at the length of the processing time, how much it costs, the capacity and the quality.
How BPM simplifies the business process
The BPM Market is growing with more businesses and industries seeing the benefits year after year. Depending on your business, the benefits you see from implementing BPM may vary. In a survey by BPTrends, companies using BPM shared these standout benefits.
- Breaking down silos and getting people talking about how to get things done
- Standardizing the way you do things. This is especially important to a global company with operations in different locations
- The organization needs to keep changing to survive, and using BPM helps to accomplish that
- Monitoring activities more carefully and responding more quickly
- Better alignment between corporate goals and business activities
- Understanding relationships
- Everyone working together
- BPM is a way to step back and see where opportunities lie
- A common language in the organization
- Getting new employees up to speed by providing them with a clear idea of how things are done
The benefits of simplifying the business process
The study of Scientific management has been around for a long time. Frederick Winslow Taylor pioneered it in the late 1800s. Simplifying business processes has many benefits, including removing waste and inefficiencies in your business. Unmanaged business processes lead to time wastage, increase in blame, demoralized employees, lack of data, more errors and even withdrawal of investors.
This discipline in operations management where people use different methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize and automate business processes is continuous. It’s these repeatable processes that improve the outcome of any project. You should be continually improving upon different parts of your business.
How to implement a BPM system into your organization
Before implementing a BPM system, it’s important to decide which approach is best for your organization’s needs. It’s not one size fits all – the system needs to align with company values and goals.
There are 7 different ways to look at business processes.
- System-focused. These are designed by programmers for system to system workflows, like baggage and package handling systems.
- Integrated focus. This focuses on finding a way to upgrade business processes designed around computer technology. It’s best used to update things like computer language programs.
- Document-focused. This is best used for critical documents that go through a workflow. For instance, payroll, contracts and any legal documents should be the target of document-focused study.
- Human-focused. This should be used for a process that requires a large amount of human input. Analyzing, writing, designing and researching are a few of the types of tasks best studied using this approach.
- Customer-focused. This approach studies the customer’s wants and needs before designing or redesigning a product or service.
- Human- and Customer-Focused. This approach puts the focus on the people ahead of focusing on automation.
- Process-Focused. This approach truly focuses on the process as opposed to customers, employees, technology or documents. It can study any and all parts of the organization.
Before deciding on an approach and implementing any system, a solid organizational understructure is required. The entire organization should be involved in the process and all stakeholders must agree on putting it in place.
Next steps
There are many different types of business processes. You should examine each step of a Business Process Management Life Cycle and the factors that could potentially make or break a BPM venture. Learn more with KnowledgeCity’s online training course on Business Process Management.
