Business processes play a huge role in every organization. Even single-person businesses have repeatable processes that contribute to the success of the brand. As your organization grows, those processes become more complex. This can lead to inefficiency and unsatisfactory bottom-line results.
Business process management can help. With this discipline, you can better understand your processes and improve them. Learn about BPM and its benefits so that you can see how it fits into the long-term success of your business.
Business process management is a discipline that focuses on creating, analyzing, changing and otherwise managing the processes at a business. A process is a repeatable series of linked tasks that result in the achievement of an organizational goal. Some processes deal with producing and delivering products and services. Others are related to other business functions such as bookkeeping and marketing.
Many business processes emerge organically based on the needs of the organization. Other processes may be more carefully planned but either lag behind the current needs of the organization or incorporate ad hoc changes in response to new circumstances. In short, the processes of many businesses are inefficient or suboptimal.
BPM focuses on identifying all the processes in an organization and managing them. Frequently, this includes measuring process performance and making changes to streamline results.
Unlike task or project management, BPM is not concerned with specific tasks that arise from projects or even the current status of tasks within a process. Instead, it manages repeatable processes, helping to ensure they can be continuously run efficiently.
Processes are at the heart of nearly all businesses. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the benefits of BPM are significant and far-reaching. These are some of the most noteworthy:
Unlike some other process improvement methodologies, BPM is not intended to be a change project. Instead, it is a continuous discipline with several processes making up a larger lifecycle. The activities can be groups into several key process management categories:
BPM can be applied in every element of an organization that involves processes. For example, if you run a B2B brand, you may want to improve your customer onboarding process from proposal to payment.
Many organizations have entirely different systems used by the sales team to make proposals, the legal team to make and complete agreements, the billing team to send invoices and the product team to deliver to the customer. By designing a smooth process with integrated systems, you could pull proposal details directly into the contract and invoices. Additionally, the information could be automatically delivered to the product team to indicate what needs to be delivered.
BPM also involves continuing to monitor that process. Perhaps it makes sense to have more manual intervention when your business is relatively small. However, BPM could model a point at which developing a bespoke software tool for managing customer onboarding would net a positive return on investment. BPM can then be used to identify exactly when that point has been reached.
As described, BPM is heavily focused on data and rigorous analysis of processes. Therefore, having the right process management tool can be very valuable.
With the right Business process management software, you can easily visualize process flows. This can aid significantly in planning, communicating and modeling processes.
Additionally, the right tools can help you to implement better data collection and analysis. For example, a BPM dashboard or reporting tool can provide you with a fast snapshot of the current state of your processes.
Software can also help directly with optimizations. By automating workflows, you can increase reliability, eliminate inefficiency and improve results.
Improving your workflows can help your business to become more successful. Documents play a key role in the processes of many organizations. Fluix can help you better create, edit and manage documents. This includes significant automation in how data is collected, shared and applied. Learn more about our product features today and contact us when you are ready to Start a Trial.
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