The call to adopt digital strategies to improve business processes is fast gaining traction. Businesses are turning to new technologies – business process management systems – to help them streamline business processes, and turbo-charge their marketing efforts.
Besides, business process management helps businesses compete favorably on a global scale. The software offers business owners, executives and managers various components – analytics, recruitment tools, good design, real-time data and insights – that help them to not only stand out, but also improve performance.
According to a recent Forrester Research survey, around 26% of firms are using BPM or workflow systems to support a majority of their business processes and 69% are poised to implement BPM in their business in the next 2 years. It’s a huge market worth over $3.2 billion, and predicted to grow at a rate of 8.2% annually.
Here are some of the top reasons why you should include BPM in your business in 2020:
1. Cost efficiency – All businesses strive to maximize profit and minimize costs. A BPM streamlines business operations and collaboration, automates repetitive tasks, improves product quality and reduces corporate risks. While you might not experience a decline in operational costs right away, eradicating bottlenecks would lead to remarkable improvements.
For example, reducing lead generation, and scoring time could have great impacts on how a business sells its services or products. It could also mean your customers will have quick access to products or services within the shortest time possible. Ultimately, your business will have increased market demand, which means increased sales volumes which in return translates to more revenue.
For example, Comindware, a business process management system, combines process management and workflow management with task management and built-in real time reporting and analysis. As such, teams can collaborate more effectively within both routine workflows and profit-generating projects. As a result, the BPM helps bring their projects to fruition within budget with reported cost savings of 30%-50%.
BPM technology also makes it easier for companies to switch gears and respond to a changing business environment faster than competitors.
“Going forward, customized offerings will go beyond ,delivering improved business efficiencies and also result in higher cost savings and business value,’ reports Bhupender Singh, CEO, Intelent Global Service.
According to Gartner research (2016), about 70% of the most profitable companies using BPM to manage their business processes thanks to real-time predictive analytics or extreme collaboration environment provided by the software.
2. Staff satisfaction – A good working environment is motivation to an organization’s staff. BPMS lead to better team collaboration. As result, it becomes easy for employees to access all the information needed in one place. The increased visibility means employees can work from anywhere at anytime, an incentive that leads to increased satisfaction. At the same time, managers are able to supervise what is going on at all times.
BPM also eliminates siloed working. That means your organization will no longer have their core departments working independently from each other. If other departments don’t know what your department is doing, it might cause problems – especially if you are running processes that tend to overlap in functionality. Thanks to business process management systems, there is increased visibility, meaning different processes will become visible to the whole organization.
BPM systems also ensure that there is zero paperwork since all documents are stored in the system. On top that, BPM platforms can collect information from numerous backend applications and show this in a user-friendly view to employees. This new BPM-occasioned feat, according to Jan Jaap, a senior BPM architect, “helps get rid of the bureaucratic and inefficient office processes” leading to happy, highly-productive employees.
3. Business agility – Inflexible companies tend to get left behind. The need to change can be either internal or external. General agility is a key feature of BPM. Gartner defines business process management as a discipline that improves enterprise performance by driving operational excellence and incorporating business agility. BPM includes the following:
- Integration and automation – Again, BPM software solutions support processes and can be pre-integrated with other software, including Project Management giving your organization full visibility, control and real-time reporting capabilities.
- Process management – which might come in the form of workflows that you can easily customize while on-the-fly.
- Rule management – today, the management scene is gradually evolving into a collaborative age. Businesses will embrace rules management as a way to stay visible, be properly governed, and compliant with various state and federal regulations while keeping processes on track.
This quick adaptation and flexibility gives a business competitive advantage.
“Instead of deploying slow-to-change packaged applications or building difficult-to-change custom solutions, leading organizations should embrace BPM methodologies which are more agile ,drive rapid process change and record dramatic improvement”, says Clay Richardson of Forrester Research. He likens BPM to a tool that fine-tunes every aspect of a business.
4. Compliance ease – All business processes needs to executed in line with various company procedures. And, for the sake of auditing, companies also need to generate documents that will help demonstrate compliance. That means businesses are working under increasing pressure to demonstrate compliance, not only to boost their online reputation, but also to avoid the ravages of criminal charges. However, it can be very costly and time consuming to businesses to amend the existing documentation process to ensure business processes comply with existing regulations.
Besides, changes in legislation and other factors require that companies have flexible systems for handling end to end compliance. Within BPM systems, companies can build compliance into their business practices if department-specific applications are integrated with the organization as a whole.
According to Optimum HQ, BPM will help in achieving optimal performance, eliminating unnecessary tasks, decreasing errors and rework and consequently maximizing returns for your organization. It is also possible to create automated reports showing compliance in less expensive ways.
That means investing in Business Process Management could, at the end of the day, help to manage the risks and unnecessary costs associated with updating and changing business process documentation and the legal penalties that might come up.
5. Customer focus – Customers are demanding thorough proof-of-concept processes that document how their needs will be heard through self-service Web 2.0 capabilities. BPM helps organizations to combine people with technology to acquire and retain satisfied customers.
According to Michael Maoz, a vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner, far too many companies handle the various aspects of the customer experience through stovepiped departments without the BPM technologies or organizational structure to provide for cohesive oversight of the operation as a whole. He, however, notes that embracing BPM software will lead to improved customer satisfaction.
Peter keen, in his book ‘The Process Edge’ proposes that “resources should be funneled to processes that are highly visible to customers and generate the greatest value”. Business process management enables organizations to customize their systems this way. To compete effectively, a company not only needs to have superior products but also the ability to please the customers.
Business Process Management is, in other words, a core subset of effective work management. BPM delivers powerful tools that offer workflow structure to information, and streamlining processes to improve performance. Investing in BPM software in 2020 onwards will not be an option but a necessity for any business that seeks to stand out in the modern business landscape. Although the benefits of Business Process Management can take some time to appear, the effects are dependable and lasting. Besides increasing profit margins, investing in BPM software will help streamline internal operations, lead to staff satisfaction, customer satisfaction and promote cost efficiency in your business.
