Behind every business, there are three main pillars: the people involved, the steps done to achieve a certain result or execute a particular task, and the business strategies, methods, and technologies needed to get things done. As businesses grow, the processes might become chaotic, especially when you hand off tasks between departments.
Table of Contents
What Is BPM and How Does It Improve a Company Performance?
Business Process Management (BPM) is a discipline that follows a set of activities a company goes through to optimize its business processes. The BPM helps us to formalize and model the processes by establishing the paths we should do and analyze the possible inefficiencies, thus streamlining business workflow and simplifying tasks execution.
Besides that, BPM is a technology that helps us to find and predict the way business processes and policies are performed. With predictability as a key, no matter the sequence of work, we always know the process routes.
Finally, BPM is the initiative led by your management company and the culture it adopts for improving business management and teamwork.
How Do BPM and BPMS Differ?
BPM and BPMS are often confused. The BPM implementation won’t be possible without BPM software known as BPMS (Business Process Management Suite). In this tandem, BPMS acts as a technological tool suite to assist BPM professionals in reaching their goals.
Over years, the global market has externalized the enterprise software to be implemented for business process automation and management. The latter covers the business rules engine, activity monitoring, process modeling and improvement, and Human Workflow. So that’s how BPMS was born.
BPMS embodiments according to Forrester Research, Inc.
BPM Lifecycle
The BPM lifecycle exists to bring in a system. It’s a schematic overview acting as a ‘map’ of business processes implementation and management. The BPM lifecycle renders the main principles of process management to be intuitively understood by the participants.
As the modern world is keeping change, it brings some alterations to social culture, availability of technologies, business operations maintenance, and, eventually, to the process lifecycle. Here we mean such ICT solutions as artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotic process automation, process mining, etc.
However, the traditional BPM lifecycle model is still relevant. With the variety of lifecycle models, we can find five common steps inherent in each of them:
- Designing. At this stage, the descriptions of the existing processes are prepared and analyzed based on the company’s data. The designing stage includes the order and area of operations, distribution of roles, tasks to be automated, etc.
- Modeling. Modeling presupposes the theoretical or visual design and the introduction of sets or variables or ‘what-if’ analysis.
- Execution. The implementation of a business process is done either automatically and/or manually. Automation means using an app to execute certain steps. The soft-driven process can rarely accomplish everything accurately, yet the combination of human- and soft-driven approaches might overcomplicate the documentation process.
- Monitoring. This stage tackles the efficiency tracking of the particular business process. The received data can be used for workflow management and the company-customer relationship bettering. The degree of monitoring varies according to the data the company wants to analyze and the way it should be tracked: real-time, nearly real-time, or ad hoc.
- Optimization. Here we mean business process refinement and improvement factoring in data gained from the previous step and feedback received from staff and customers. In case the business process gets inefficient, there’s Business Process Re-engineering (BPR).
BPM Tools
Technology tools can help us visually depict, arrange, monitor, measure, and control the company’s workflow, information, and output policy documents. With a variety of BPM software solutions, we’ll mention the easiest to use ones.
Flowrigami is an open-source software which makes BPM implementation smooth and easy. It’s achieved through workflows creation, alteration, and visualization. As an intuitive and user-management easy tool, Flowrigami supports UML activity elements, yet the BPMN support is about to be unleashed.
IBM Blueworks Live is another good tool for setting a collaborative environment and improving business processes via mapping. Its huge plus is that it’s cloud-based, thus fast to access with no installation required.
As a user-friendly and cloud-based app, Quixy helps users with no coding skills to automate business processes and build enterprise-scale apps. It has a myriad of in-built solutions for many use cases such as HRMS, Project Management, CRM, and more.
There’s also the intelligent BPMS (iBPMS) that renders next-generation solutions such as advanced collaboration tools and adaptive analytics.
How Does BPM Help to Make the Most out of Business?
The BPM system is becoming more and more efficient due to the increasing RIO (Return on Investment). The list below suggests more reasons why a company should go for BPM:
- Dynamic Management. As roughly 30% of business processes are static, the remaining 70% require dynamic management: the introduction of qualitative changes to the lifecycle, hence tailoring the whole business process and boosting the performance at lower risks.
- Agility. The constant improvement of inner processes and thirst for innovation is the key privilege for any business. BPM saves time and hassles when it comes to the business strategy shift.
- Customer Service. Having your processes personalized leads to both service and product improvement. Reducing the cost of workflow management means fewer expenses from the customer side.
- Security. Facilitating compliance and thorough documentation helps both sides involved stay on the safe side.
Latest Trends
Rapid app development (RAD and also RAB) based on no-code/low-code models has become as relevant as ever for BPMS platforms. The RAD methodology doesn’t presuppose scrupulous compliance with the plan, but rather a rapid and cost-effective app deployment with a glance to user reviews.
RPA technologies can easily automate static processes. The AI is used in BPM for many tasks such as handling large amounts of data and analytics in real-time, customer requests, documents, etc. Chatbots are also popular for some processes of automation.
All-in-all, BPM solutions are on the way to be universal and combine the functionality now existing as stand-alone software products.
