To get ahead of the competition, businesses should always look for ways to improve and streamline processes. Business process management (BPM) is a powerful method used for streamlining and optimizing your company’s business processes. Instead of focusing on the improvement of individual tasks, BPM focuses on your entire workflow to efficiently achieve corporate goals.
In this post, we’ll discuss BPM, why it’s important, the steps to using BPM in your workflow, and the different types of process management.
What is BPM?
BPM is a process improvement methodology that breaks down the workflow of your business processes in an effort to streamline those processes for maximum efficiency. The aim is to analyze all the tasks and steps in the workflow so you can regulate the overall processes to quickly and efficiently reach goals without sacrificing quality. The idea is to increase agility and business performance through better use of tools, documentation, techniques, and best practices.
What is BPM workflow?
A business can deal with inefficiencies only for a limited time. Small inefficiencies can become big problems down the road that lead to unnecessary costs, low quality, and unhappy customers. Adopting BPM methodologies and analyzing your processes and workflows can help you find areas that need improvement. Improving your workflow and business process management can help you stay a step ahead of your competition by eliminating waste and increasing quality output.
BPM workflows are actionable results of strategic business process management that help your business tangibly improve, like what you’d implement for more intentional onboarding or improved customer support ticket resolution. Effective BPM workflows should be structured, measurable, and goal-oriented.
Why is BPM important?
Because the business landscape changes rapidly, it’s important to embrace BPM to help you make the right adjustments that will keep you competitive in your market. BPM practices can help you to be:
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Efficient: BPM helps you reduce bottlenecks and eliminate redundancies so your teams can work more efficiently.
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Agile: BPM can help you adapt quickly to changing business environments and consumer attitudes.
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Consistent: BPM helps you develop standardized processes to ensure consistent quality and customer satisfaction.
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Strategically aligned: Use BPM to align your processes with strategic goals to ensure that everybody is on the same track.
What are the essential components of BPM?
Using BPM means that you are trying to understand your business processes. This understanding helps you to keep things running smoothly and look for ways to improve continuously. You’re probably wondering how BPM works. In short, it’s comprised of the following components:
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Process modeling: Map out your processes to give you a bird’s-eye view of the overall workflow. This helps you understand individual tasks, steps, assignments, and milestones to see potential bottlenecks, redundancies, and other potential problems so you can start to explore areas for improvement.
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Automation: Analyzing and understanding your processes helps you identify repetitive tasks that can be automated. This reduces manual effort and helps to minimize or eliminate errors. Automating repetitive processes can ensure better consistency and improve process efficiency.
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Execution and control: BPM gives you real-time visibility into process execution and status. This helps you ensure that processes are executed on schedule and that they follow predefined guidelines and rules.
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Measurement and optimization: BPM uses metrics and KPIs to evaluate process performance. These measurements can help you optimize your processes to meet your goals and customer expectations.
Types of BPM
There are three main types of BPM you should analyze and implement: integration-centric, human-centric, and document-centric.
Integration-centric BPM
The focus of this type of BPM is on processes that move between different systems with little human involvement. The idea is to ensure smooth data integration across various software applications, systems, and data sources.
Human-centric BPM
Unlike integration-centric BPM, this type focuses on tasks, activities, and skills that require human interaction, such as tasks that require review or approval before proceeding to the next step.
Document-centric BPM
This type is focused on the management-specific documents that are of value to your organization, such as contracts and procurement documents. Document-centric process activities might include image scanning and collecting, document review or approval, signature gathering, reporting, etc. For example, healthcare centers that rely on medical reports and clinical tests might have document-centric BPM practices in place.
Business process management workflow steps
Follow these six steps for both large and small business process management.
Step 1: Planning
Work with management and key stakeholders to identify areas of your company that might not work as efficiently as possible. Interview the people involved in the processes, look at existing documentation, and observe the processes in action if possible. Become familiar with these processes so you understand how they start, the workflow of their tasks and steps, and what the end result should be.
Document all of the steps, tasks, roles, inputs, outputs, etc., involved in these business processes. This can help you categorize the processes based on the three types of BPM so you can develop the right BPM strategy that aligns with your company’s goals.
Step 2: Designing and mapping
After identifying which business processes you want to improve, create visual process models. Lucidchart has everything you need to create flowcharts and diagrams to help you visualize how the processes currently work and how you would like them to work. Be sure to map the sequence of all process activities (tasks, steps, decision points, reviews, and other interactions).
Lucid offers a variety of free templates to help kick-start your diagramming.
