Every company is made up of various processes across departments, from human resources to finance to content management. In many organizations, vital processes are inefficient and rife with errors, which impacts areas like revenue, customer experience, and performance. By using strategies to rework and reorganize said processes, companies can achieve the outcomes they envisioned from the start.
That’s where business process management (BPM) comes into play. Learn more about this strategy below to see how you can apply it to your company’s processes and where it can make a difference.
Business process management helps companies establish and improve their business workflows. With a broader scope than other process management strategies, such as project management, BPM focuses on the entire organization or department in an end-to-end process with steps that can be repeated.
An example of BPM is creating a template for employee time off requests and process for submission and approval or denial — this would be repeated endless times after implementation and focuses on a vital process that affects the entire company.
BPM is an approach you can customize to your company to achieve results like increased employee productivity, more satisfied clients or customers, and more revenue. With BPM and its related methods, you can manage your entire organization more effectively and intuitively.
BPM helps organizations achieve big-picture goals through a series of steps, which generally include:
The business process management lifecycle requires proper collaboration — be sure to work closely with your team and address communication issues accordingly.
The many benefits of BPM can help you meet your business objectives:
When teams within a business use different approaches to achieve similar results, disorganization occurs. It can be more difficult to follow security and quality guidelines, which results in less accountability and management.
In comparison, BPM supplies a clear-cut, streamlined process that increases standardization across the board. Every step is clearly defined and outlined, allowing team members to know their roles and managers to guide their teams through the process.
Once you implement and optimize a process through BPM, you can usually automate it successfully.
For example, you might create a process for customer inquiries based on their method of contact. If a customer fills out a contact form on your website, you could include an automated step that signals a salesperson to get back to them. Then, your sales team won’t have to go through the customer inquiries themselves.
Thanks to automation, you can implement highly efficient processes throughout your company, which helps your employees build more productive workflows and achieve faster results.
One of the main goals of your business is to ensure customer and client satisfaction. When your patrons are happy with your products or services, they become loyal to your brand and share their positive experiences with others, which helps you widen your reach.
BPM can help you optimize processes that directly impact your customers and clients. For example, managing your accounts payable process without BPM could lead to inconsistencies and confusion that lead to past-due accounts and other consequences that impact both your business and your patrons. In comparison, formatting that process using BPM helps you ensure every step of the process is clear and easy to understand.
Ultimately, incorporating BPM as a strategy can ensure businesses have structured processes they can rely on to improve the customer experience. Plus, certain BPM steps are generally easy to automate, so companies can streamline operations even further.
BPM can apply to many broad processes in organizations, such as customer service, which we discussed above briefly. Here are a few other examples of BPM use cases:
BPM has numerous applications that range across company departments. Whether your order fulfillment department needs a better way to organize and advertise special offers or your content management employees want to better manage content rights processes, BPM can be a highly efficient and practical way to achieve results. Altogether, how you apply BPM to your business depends on your goals and current processes.
While BPM is possible through manual means, using business process management software can make the strategy even more impactful. Salient Process offers numerous business automation solutions that can take your organization’s process to the next level. Since 2011, we’ve helped businesses just like yours use Digital Business Automation to perform and grow more successfully.
Interested in what BPM software can do for your company? Learn more about how we can support your business goals through automation by getting in touch with an advisor today.
