Business process management (BPM), as defined by Gartner, employs methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve and optimize business strategy and processes.
While it is sometimes confused with task and project management, the business process management scope is broader than these adjacent topics. Task management focuses on individual tasks whereas BPM observes the whole end-to-end process. Project management refers to a one-time scope of work while BPM focuses specifically on processes that are repeatable.
Through continuous process reengineering, organizations can streamline their overall workflows, leading to increased efficiencies and cost-savings. This concept isn’t new; six sigma and lean principles are examples of BPM methodologies.
By incorporating advanced analytics, activity monitoring, and decision management capabilities, business process management suites are able to coordinate people, systems, and information and material to achieve business outcomes. As a result, they have been particularly helpful in accelerating digital transformation strategies.
There are three main types of business process management: integration-centric, human-centric, and document-centric
A successful BPM system starts by defining the stages involved in a workflow. This helps the team identify areas of improvement and metrics to track progress. By applying business process management, organizations can improve their operations, leading to better business outcomes. To achieve these results, you should fully understand the BPM lifecycle. Here are the five lifecycle steps:
A successful BPM project requires careful planning and open communication, but after improving a set of activities, teams quickly see the benefits of it.
BPM solutions increase organizational value through process improvement, yielding a number of benefits. Some of these include:
BPM systems help to optimize existing processes and to incorporate more structure into the development of new processes. It does this by removing process redundancies and bottlenecks, resulting in improved efficiency and productivity. With more agility, businesses can achieve their intended business outcomes at a faster rate, and they can allocate any excessive resources to other high priority work.
A BPM suite of tools assists in eliminating repetitive work and in making information more accessible. By removing distractions, employees are able to focus on their work and their customers, leading to increases in customer satisfaction. Clear workflows also shorten the learning curve within the employee onboarding process, enhancing productivity and engagement.
Since BPM enables better process execution and workflow automation, this transfers well when scaling processes to other geographies across the world. Business process management tools can bring clarity to roles, ensuring consistency along the process, and it can also surface opportunities to incorporate business rules for automation, allowing teams to focus more on innovation.
Since business process automation clearly defines owners for tasks along the process, this provides more transparency and accountability throughout a given process. This fosters more communication among teams.
BPM offers low-code features which remove potential dependencies on development. Business users can be onboarded onto these tools quickly and easily, increasing process automation across the company.
BPM software provides more structure around processes, removing some of the inefficiencies within a given workflow. Some examples where it has been applied successfully include:
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