Business process management plays a critical role in helping companies achieve their strategy by aligning resources, technology and supporting structures toward achieving desired business outcomes.
As we covered in the first blog in this series, business process management (BPM) is a management approach and methodology leveraged to address strategic business issues by enabling end-to-end flexibility, visibility, cost-effectiveness and efficiency of business processes organization wide.
A robust BPM approach engages supporting technologies like business process management solutions (BPMS) and robotic process automation (RPA) to accelerate process improvement and workforce optimization.
Business process management and supporting technologies enable benefits across multiple business facets:
- Business agility
- Cost structure and revenue generation
- Visibility and transparency
- Technology enablement.
Process Improvement Meets Business Agility
Most companies are experiencing the need to keep pace with ever-changing marketplaces related to adapting to the customer or competitive needs, meeting regulatory requirements and evolving to provide an unmatched customer experience. BPM provides business agility by offering the capability to modify business processes (e.g., activities, user interfaces, routing, business rules) in real time.
This leads to faster recognition of reduced process cycle time and increasing customer service, among other benefits, which provides a distinct competitive advantage to companies employing BPM.
Impact on Cost Structure and Revenue Generation
BPM also significantly impacts an organization’s cost structure (by enabling cost reduction or quality improvements through automation efforts) and revenue generation (by improving processing time, providing timely customer communication and enhancing the overall customer experience). Similarly, in companies challenged to expand without adding headcount, BPM enables “growth without growing” by improving process efficiency and effectiveness.
Process Management Facilitates Visibility and Transparency
The third challenge companies are experiencing today is ineffective process management and task service level management, compounded by an inability to recognize where process issues exist. BPM solutions have functionality that provides process visibility and transparency.
Optimizing a business process with BPM facilitates managing processes, task service levels, prioritization, escalations and communication to proactively anticipate, manage and correct current process problems while anticipating and avoiding future issues. In addition, BPM provides analytics to determine where to focus process improvement efforts.
Business Process Management as a Technology Enabler
Finally, companies use BPM solutions as a pure technology enabler. These tools can streamline the implementation of process-centric point solutions by providing a workflow engine backbone and functioning as the front-end (portal or mobile), reporting or rules solution to multiple back-end systems. All this prevents the need for a lengthy technology platform consolidation.
Conclusion
To remain competitive in a rapidly changing business environment, companies must continue to look for tools that can provide differentiation for their customer experiences, which are both directly and indirectly impacted by business processes. BPM fills the process improvement gap and avoids the pitfalls of purchasing and implementing multiple technology solutions by providing a single underlying process management backbone you can leverage to meet various needs spanning multiple business processes, areas and goals.
In the final blog of this series, we’ll discuss how adding a business process management solution can take your process improvement initiatives to the next level.
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