Business growth is a good thing—but it does bring its own set of challenges.
As teams, processes, and workflows develop, they sometimes become cluttered with inefficiencies that cause productivity to stagnate. Fast growth sometimes means certain stakeholders are left in the dark about parts of critical processes, or that time and money go to waste on bottlenecks and other issues.
From sorting the mail to interactions between your sales and marketing teams, inefficient processes can be a headache. But if this sounds familiar, it might be time to try a simple methodology: Business process management.
What Is Business Process Management?
Business process management (BPM) is the practice of designing, implementing, executing, analyzing, and optimizing a business’s practices.
Though it’s sometimes confused with terms like “workflow automation” or “task management,” the goal of BPM is to help with specific outcomes, usually improving an organization’s processes or efficiency.
In other words, the goal isn’t simply to automate or re-engineer but to improve a business’s processes as a whole. This goes beyond making a suggestion for a minor fix, or improving a single step of a process; leaders engaged in BPM take a careful look at the end-to-end view of the process as a whole to optimize it in its entirety. It’s also worth noting that this process is designed to be ongoing rather than a one-time solution.
What Are the Basic Steps of BPM?
As you might guess, BPM can be a lengthy and complex undertaking. However, there are a few basic steps that most strategies use when optimizing a process through BPM.
Assessment: BPM practitioners work to understand and map the process as a whole, the business rules, and the results of the current process by discussing the procedures and target outcomes with stakeholders.
Design: Using the information from the assessment stage, BPM practitioners design solutions to current process issues, presenting iterations of their design to stakeholders for analysis.
Execution: BPM practitioners carry out the new process via small tests with limited users.
Monitoring: On a continuous basis, BPM practitioners monitor and analyze the process and its outcomes, weighing feedback from stakeholders and performance according to organizational KPIs.
Modification: The process is regularly adjusted based on the new data and outcomes, ensuring that improvements continue on an ongoing basis.
What Benefits Do Businesses See With BPM?
As stated above, BPM is an excellent way for organizations to work toward continuous improvements. However, there are several additional benefits from harnessing BPM in your company:
- Increased agility due to continuous adjustments
- Added efficiency from improved processes
- Financial gains from fewer bottlenecks and issues
- Better responsiveness to new customer demands
- Easier customer retention with streamlined process strategies
- Cross-departmental collaboration for better performance
Now that you have a better idea of how business process management works, and how it can help your company, it’s time to see if this discipline is right for you! Implementing regular changes to your most critical processes can revolutionize the way your company works, so take some time to understand how you can implement it where it matters.
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