Why is Business Process Management Important? Examples of BPM Software Solutions

In business, passion and grit can only go so far. For you to be able to drive your company forward, you will need to have calculated processes. These are what will help you control your costs, keep productivity levels consistent, and maintain the quality of customer experience you provide.

If you want to make sure that all aspects of your operations are in optimal condition, it is best to have a business process management plan in place. This is what will help you design workflows in line with your short-term and long-term objectives. What’s more, these are great for helping you find ways to improve your operational efficiency by removing bottlenecks in your processes.

To help you further understand the other benefits you can reap from this, we will give you a breakdown of why is business process management important for your company. We even compiled a list of business process management software that you can use to reinforce your efforts.

Examples of Business Process Management Software

It is better to understand the importance of BPM when you have a tool to tinker with. So, before we discuss the top benefits of BPM, consider getting a software tool. No worries, you need not pay an upfront fee, many vendors provide you with a free trial period without strings attached. Below are some of the best examples of business process management software to try.

There’s a wide selection of business process management software for small business and large companies alike. So, you shouldn’t worry about spending too much time to find the right one for your operations. To help you get started, here are some examples of the most reliable platforms available on the market:

monday.comVISIT WEBSITE

monday.com is a popular platform helps managers get important insights into team performance, including metrics such as budget spend and project status. The software also boosts team productivity through features for automating tasks and built-in process management templates. Through monday.com, you can easily analyze ongoing business processes and refine them as needed.

WrikeVISIT WEBSITE

Wrike is primarily a project management system, this tool can also be used for agile business process management. It offers interactive timelines, workload tracking, task delegation, and customized reporting to help you manage your operations as well as check it for rooms for improvement.

KiSSFLOWVISIT WEBSITE

KiSSFLOW is a BPM platform that sets itself apart from other solutions because of its human-centric approach to workflow creation and fuss-free interface. With it, you get access to essential tools such as collaboration and task management but also have more advanced features for business logic, conditional workflows, and reporting.

Studio Creatio EnterpriseVISIT WEBSITE

Studio Creatio Enterprise offers process modeling, execution, monitoring, and analysis features, ensuring an efficient BPM solution for your company. Studio Creatio Enterprise is built with industry best practices in its system, automating internal practices like modeling process flows and document approval processes.

ActiveBatchVISIT WEBSITE

ActiveBatch is designed as an enterprise solution for workload automation and job scheduling. It serves as a central platform for managing enterprise-level business processes such as IT file and document storage, and data analytics. The software also eases workflow process management through production-ready building blocks for workflow automation.

vtenextVISIT WEBSITE

vtenext is a customer relationship management and business process management system built to handle a company’s marketing, sales, and customer service tasks. Its BPM module allows users to plan and automatically execute business processes with higher accuracy and less cost. With this at your disposal, you not only get a bird’s eye view of your active tasks, but you can also gain insights into your operational performance.

What is Business Process Management?

Okay, granting you’ve got yourself a nice BPM software, let’s put that into use. First, let’s discuss the principles behind BPM.

Business process management is the discipline of organizing, analyzing, and improving different operational workflows. If your business were a machine, this would be the grease that lubricates the gears that keep it running. It often involves a series of techniques and structured methodologies that allow you to evaluate and standardize workflows, work around unexpected situations, and ensure the cost-efficiency of operations. As mentioned previously, nowadays, this practice is often carried out using advanced business process management solutions instead of through manual means. These tools are designed to simplify and optimize the entire process by eliminating tedious tasks and consolidating your information in one convenient place. Some of the key features that these business process automation software offer are:

• Visual Process Modeling
• Business Rules Engine
• Business Process Testing
• Social Collaboration
• KPI Monitoring and Measurement
• Data Analytics

Where BPM is Important

The human brain is fickle. In fact, an average person takes roughly 25 minutes to recover from distractions. Meaning, if you were doing a task and took a short break to eat or maybe run an errand, it would take you minutes before you are able to regain momentum and resume the task at hand.

Put into the context of your business operations, every time your workflow is interrupted for any reason—such as a new project or industry regulation updates—you will take a significant amount of time to adjust to the changes and bounce back to your regular work. If you don’t have a structured approach to handle these, it can definitely have a negative impact on your bottom line. This is where business process management comes in.

Business process management will allow you to create models and measure metrics so that evaluating current workflows is easier. As you can see below, this BPM can maximize cost-efficiency, optimize time-to-market, and facilitate better customer self-service.

Three Areas Where BPM Has the Most Impact

Sometimes, however, it’s not enough to simply have a solid business process management plan in place for your operations. As your tasks increase and your workflows get more complicated, staying on top of them becomes more difficult. This is why you might want to consider investing in business process management software.

According to a 2018 Red Hat survey on business process management, 65% of professionals say that BPM technologies help their overall efficiency. These will allow you to cut down the time it takes to map out tasks and test workflows.

There are more business process management benefits to be had when you use technology to implement BPM principles. Let’s find out the main ones now.

Reasons Why Business Process Management is Important

1. Strategically maximize resources to minimize expenditures

Business process management allows you to reduce the cost to execute transactions by giving you a closer look at your workflows. This way, you can find out what needs improvement, quickly make adjustments to eliminate bottlenecks, allowing you to spend your billable hours on more important tasks. It should also help you have a better understanding of how you are using your resources so you can allocate them properly and make sure that they are being maximized.

If you are to use a software, you can even use data analytics to find out if there are aspects of your operations that don’t necessarily add value to your end goal. Some tools also come equipped with A/B testing and similar features to help you gauge the effectiveness of new workflows before rolling them out. By doing so, you can save yourself from risky and costly implementation procedures.

2. Gives you better visibility and control of your business processes

Running a business involves quite a number of tasks. If you own a small startup, you may still get away with simply knowing your processes by heart and making decisions based on what you think is best at the moment. However, as you onboard more employees and expand your company, you will no longer be able to micromanage your operations. You will eventually have to delegate work and make sure that you and your employees are working as a single entity.

With business process management, you can map out workflows from beginning to end. You can also come up with a central repository where you can detail the protocols and tasks related to particular aspects of your operations. This way, you can avoid confusion and make it simpler for your employees to understand how to perform their tasks.

By reinforcing BPM with software solutions, you can also get access to dashboards that give you a 360-degree, real-time view of your processes. This way, you can see the status of your productivity as you operate. Moreover, making minor changes to workflows is easier with its visual process modeling. There are even platforms with built-in communication suites so relaying the changes to employees is much faster.

3. Pinpoint operational deficiencies to improve productivity.

There will always be room for improvement when it comes to workplace productivity. However, the process of enhancing it can be quite tedious. More often than not, businesses have a reactive approach to this by changing workflows only to address specific situations or problems. Those who want to be more proactive sometimes rely on trial and error wherein they simply add or subtract tasks from their process to see what works.

By implementing BPM, you can take the guesswork out process improvement. It lets you evaluate your workflows to see your key deficiencies. This way, you can come up with more targeted and efficient remedies to bottlenecks in your process.

As we mentioned previously, if you use a software, you can even perform business process modeling and testing prior to making the changes. By doing so, so you don’t have to go through the hassle of readjusting only to find that the new process isn’t as effective as you made it out to be.

4. Make better business decisions to remain competitive.

Business process management can be used to streamline your processes from the get-go. This means you can simply map out your workflows and set it aside until you have to reevaluate it. You can eliminate the need to manage it every second of every day, allowing you to free up time for more attention-demanding tasks as well as headspace for better decision making.

If you opt to use a software, you can even automate your BPM efforts. This way, you eliminate all the busywork associated with it and allot more of your productive hours for other aspects of your business.

5. Fine-tunes workflows to increase operational agility.

Lastly, business process management is great for helping companies increase operational agility. The practice’s methodical approach to operations allows businesses to gain a deeper understanding of their workflow. It helps them get a good look at the interdependency of their resources and processes. This way, it is easier to strike a balance between them once market trends, customer demands, and industry regulations shift.

You’ll find this benefit is much more evident as you start using software solutions. These tools will not only help you draft new processes faster but also implement them at lightning speed. Plus, with testing tools and data analytics, you will be able to cross-check if your new workflows will affect your existing ones, preventing problems even before they happen.

How Can You Make The Most Out of Business Process Management?

Once you’ve formed a business process management plan and found a software to help you implement it, you might be wondering what’s next. How exactly will you get your return on investment and make sure that your business processes will remain in tiptop shape? To help you out, here are some steps that you can take to take your business process management efforts to the next level:

1. Regularly analyze your procedures. The demands of your consumers change so it only makes sense that your processes should, too. By regularly analyzing your procedures’ effectiveness in meeting industry requirements, you should be able to stay on top of your operations.
2. Set objectives for improvements. Having a BPM plan and software may allow you to find rooms for improvement in your processes but these aren’t capable of making the modifications for you. What you can do is to leverage the data you get from these tools and make it a habit to set clear goals and objectives on how you can make your workflows better.
3. Stay updated on BPM trends. Staying competitive relies heavily on knowing what’s new in your industry. After all, how will you know your progress if you don’t know what to keep up with? To remain updated, you can consider making it a habit to read the news on BPM or perhaps subscribe to annual studies/surveys on the matter.
4. Apply BPM best practices. Like any other aspect of your business, there are best practices associated with BPM. These ensure that you are making the most out of the discipline. A good place to start would be this list of business process management best practices.
5. Master your BPM software. BPM platforms won’t operate themselves. If you truly want to use them to your advantage, you have to know the ins and outs of the system and understand how each of its functions will help your business. Check the examples of business process management software above. This way, you can be sure to pick one of the best solutions in the field.

Hopefully, with this article, you were able to further understand why business process management is important for your company as well as get a good idea of what tools and strategies you can use to implement it as effectively as possible.