In the 20th century, businesses focused on physical assets and supply chains, which resulted in the birth of Lean Six Sigma. The central point of this methodology was to avoid change and standardize business operations. Today’s business climate adopts a new methodology that focuses on change and innovation, contrary in every way to the 20th century’s approaches to business activity.
This shows that business process management (BPM) has gone beyond operational efficiency. It’s now an ongoing process that embraces change and provides a holistic approach to attaining business outcomes. On that note, this article will discuss the meaning of business process management, how it works, and its benefits.
Business Process Management Defined
Certainly, to understand business process management, you must first understand what business process means. So, exactly what is business process management? Business process management is a discipline that aims at the use of different methods and strategies to measure, automate, improve, and optimize business results. It eliminates the logic of fixed processes and focuses on optimizing workflow to create value.
A business process represents the blueprint through which business goals are achieved. In simple terms, business processes involve breaking down a single workflow into a set of activities to achieve overall reliability and consistency. Therefore, it must be precise, adaptable, and efficient for a business process to be successful. However, developing such a business process can be challenging, and this is where business process management software is required.
How does business process management work?
Every company needs to have a business process in its operations. They enable disparate units of the organization to collaborate and interact with suppliers, customers, and stakeholders. Therefore, companies must learn to prioritize flexibility, efficiency, and agility when developing a business process.
Unfortunately, many companies do not know how to develop an efficient business process, and this could be because of their understanding of how business process management works. For some, a BPM strategy is all about automation technology—the evolution of business process automation tools. For others, it’s about business process improvement, new process design, or communicating how things should be done.
While it’s true that none of these definitions are wrong in their entirety, they’re only narrow subparts of BPM, and applying them as they are means the business will not achieve the full benefits of BPM. business process management uses a systematic approach to optimizing and managing business processes. It works by helping organizations design, model, measure, and implement workflows and business rules.
The goal of any BPM tool is to aid businesses in developing processes that align with their company goals. It enables the identification and definitions of steps needed to complete individual tasks, then integrates these steps into the existing processes, simplifying them to produce a consistent and efficient whole.
3 Benefits of Business Process Management
There are several benefits of business process management (BPM) for companies which include the following.
1. Compliance and Transparency
Failure to adhere to rules and regulations that affect business productivity can attract costly fines and unnecessary complications. As such, BPM ensures that businesses can implement and comply with regulatory requirements timely.
With BPM, you can easily integrate compliance into the cycle time of business processes, making the company process more transparent and visible to all employees.
2. Improves Agility
When it comes to business management, there’s a constant need for change, which could result from market demands, new regulations, or workflow automation. Either way, organizations must have the ability to react to change and react quickly to remain competitive. By adopting BPM’s flexible designs, companies in the speed and ability to pause their current processes at the slightest sign of a problem, make adjustments and then pick up from where it stopped with minimal lost time, making it meet new demands quickly.
3. Increased Efficiency
BPM practices allow businesses to increase efficiency and save more resources by helping them pinpoint areas of improvement and eliminate the bottlenecks from them. BPM provides better designed, executed, and monitored processes that eliminate redundancies and reduce the risk of fraud or negligence caused by human error.
