What is business process management?
Why is business process management important to an organization?
What are some of the common issues businesses face without business process management?
What is Business Process Management?
Business process management (BPM) is the operational blueprint of your business. All the processes in your organization are identified, analysed, and optimized. This practice will enhance the efficiency of any organization, regardless of business strategy or approach.
BPM condenses micro and macro processes, providing you with a bird’s eye view of your business. From there, you are able to identify in essence what value your business delivers to its customers. Once identified, a BPM plan will streamline, automate, or eliminate all that does not bring direct value to the customer. You can gain a holistic view of your business by designing a map of the granular processes at an operational level. You can then determine what is working, what isn’t, and what can be improved.
What one typically finds in a business without (a solid) BPM plan
From a BPM perspective, the problems many businesses face are related to poorly planned and described business processes. A broad, idealized business strategy is often the cause of ineffective processes. A business strategy will generally plan for the best-case scenario; how the business will operate when all is going well. However, people often don’t plan for the worst-case scenario unless there is no other option. When lacking the systematic improvement of processes, businesses tend to go into firefighting mode. They tackle the symptoms of problems as opposed to the causes. Your organization becomes reactive versus proactive. Essentially, the business is not equipped for disaster management.
And when your business is successful, without specific operational processes that are clear and well documented, it is nearly impossible to replicate and standardize what works and eliminate what doesn’t. Determining whether your success is the result of specific people, technologies, or processes is difficult.
Additionally, redundant or poorly described process maps won’t allow the flexibility to ride the market highs and lows, or the stability with which to grow from.
Why is business process management important to organizations?
- Standardization
- Sustainability
- Growth
Standardization
Standardization is the baseline from which to improve and grow, and essentially business process management enables standardization. With successful processes identified and repeated, you are now able to consistently meet and exceed customers’ expectations. Having an effective blueprint for your business enables you to scale. You can now easily replicate your desired results and avoid unwanted results.
Once you have identified your processes, documented them, and can easily access and communicate them, you have essentially managed your process. The next step is refining and improving those processes. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Sustainability
BPM enhances the longevity of your business. By standardizing your processes, whatever is effective can remain so. While the business follows its effective process map, you can make small changes to adapt to different circumstances. Your business will improve its ability to serve external customers with greater consistency. This will build your company’s reputation.
Business process management also enables you, as an owner or manager, to distance yourself and work on your business instead of in your business. You are now able to see the whole as opposed to the details of everyday business life. Once you’re at that stage, you no longer need to be the person who everything about everything. Suddenly you can delegate. You can sleep easy when someone else takes over a task, because it is clear how the task is done. It no longer matters as much who is completing a task; it will be completed in a specific way – the right way.
The sustainability BPM offers extends to your training strategy. Business process management enables you to train people in such a way that is sustainable and repeatable. Your training outcomes do not depend on the training facilitator or who is being trained. The material is the same, taught in a manner that is replicable. And if you then have to refer to training material, you are all referring to a standard.
Growth
Through managing and standardizing your processes, the business should start to run like a well-oiled machine. Now, your business can safely grow while consistently delivering. As you have effective and consistent processes, it is easy to tweak specific processes for improvement. You can now improve on the go, and grow as you improve. This growth extends to the business’ improved to react to the ever-changing market. The stability of your model also allows for improved flexibility to react to the fluctuating market.
The benefits that effective BPM provides will cultivate an environment of continual improvement and promote growth within your business. Business processes are the backbone of your business operations and improving them is of strategic importance to your organization.
In conclusion
Need help getting unpacking your business processes? Providing insight into business processing issues in a business is one of Analyze’s many strengths. We understand that businesses need processes, people, and technology. We don’t look at them separately. To improve your business process management, we know that all three factors need to support one another. We understand that there’s an efficient way of going about business. To support it, you need efficient processes.
So get in touch with us today if you are looking for the expertise of a niche management consulting firm.
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