What is business process management?

Unlock the benefits of BPM

Before you begin building a BPM strategy, it’s important to understand why efficient business processes are important, the different types of business processes, who’s responsible for them within your company, and which problems BPM can help you address.

Get to know your business processes

A business process is a series of repeatable tasks that’s done in sequence to achieve a routine objective. Business processes can take minutes or weeks and include activities as simple as employee holiday requests or as complicated as supply-chain logistics. Efficient, effective processes will help improve employee productivity, customer engagement, and every other facet of your business. Inefficient, dysfunctional processes create frustrated employees, unnecessary costs, dissatisfied customers, and ultimately, lost revenue.

Business processes can be divided into three main categories:

• Operational processes cover the core business and specific value streams like customer orders, account creation, and manufacturing optimisation.
• Management processes include things like corporate governance, budgets, and HR workflows.
• Supporting processes underpin larger processes in areas like accounting, recruitment, and technical support.

By automating all types of business processes, you can improve efficiency, reduce risk, and keep your business more strategically focused.

Build your BPM team

Employees who are responsible for any business process are called business process owners. Because they manage a process from end to end, they understand how it affects and is affected by the processes that come before and after it. Giving ownership of discrete business processes to key employees who work with other departments can foster more understanding and lead to better BPM across your organisation.

For example, a successful BPM team in a large company could include all these roles:

• Business process champion. A champion understands far-reaching benefits and communicates the value of BPM to the organisation.
• Process owner. A person or team with business challenges to meet, workflows to streamline, or opportunities to seize can provide key perspective and input—critical to user buy-in and BPM success.
• Business process director. A director leads organisation-wide BPM efforts.
• Business process consultant. A consultant uses technical skills and understanding of BPM to advise a business process director.
• Project manager. A project manager helps build and implement the project plan and manages team communications, milestones, deliverables, and deadlines.
• Business analyst. An analyst pinpoints necessary process improvements.
• Solution architect. A solution architect provides technical support, particularly when it comes to interoperability with existing line-of-business applications.
• Influencers. Often leaders among their peers, influencers adopt early and champion new ideas, practices, and tools, and they help refine business process improvements and advocate for change.
• BPM support group. This group comprises key IT professionals, corporate planning officers, and other leadership who help institutionalize BPM standards, methods, governance, and technology.

Build a business process management strategy

If your business struggles with operational, management, and support processes that are cumbersome, redundant, too long, too slow, or too costly, creating a comprehensive BPM strategy can help. The following best practices will help you launch a BPM initiative and evaluate your success:

• Get support from management. This is critical if you need resources to support your business process improvement plans.
• Analyse and map the specific process. Use flow charts, mind mapping, or process-mining software to find bottlenecks, duplicated effort, and unnecessary delays. Get feedback from the people who are most involved with the process to understand what you can improve—buy-in for change starts with them.
• Redesign the process. Solicit stakeholder input and be sure that everyone understands the value in streamlining the process. Include your lessons learned from mind mapping and analysis. Consider an impact analysis for critical or complex workflows.
• Gather resources and implement change. Collect the resources that you need to build an effective BPM platform, such as project management software, workflow automation tools, and real-time dashboards. Pick resources that align with the business value that you want to create and manage the change with specific deliverables and timelines. By first rolling out a small pilot, you can work out bugs, build enthusiasm for improved practices, and drive adoption.
• Track and optimise. Monitor how your new processes work by checking in with stakeholders. Be prepared to add refinements as necessary.

Create BPM value

If you follow the best practices above, build a solid BPM team, and understand how you can improve processes to create more value, business process management can yield tangible benefits, including:

• Increased productivity. More efficient processes create more efficient employees, and you can evaluate performance metrics by using workplace analytics software.
• Faster time to benefit. Improving your IT processes can affect how quickly software applications are developed and deployed in your business.
• Improved quality. In addition to accelerating development, improvements in testing can quickly resolve any performance or security issues, enhancing your product or service quality.
• Increased customer satisfaction. Fixing your business’s customer service processes can help win customers and drive loyalty.
• Improved employee work experiences. Efficient business processes are the foundation of satisfaction in the workplace, improving morale and potentially reducing turnover.