One of the best ways to make your business more profitable is to reduce expenses. Business process management (BPM) is an excellent methodology for achieving efficiencies.
BPM takes various forms and has numerous benefits in addition to increasing profitability. This post will look at how BPM can improve your business, how to implement it, and then some examples of how BPM can make any business engine run more smoothly.
Business Process Management Defined
Business process management refers to examining a businesss processes, identifying how they can be improved, and then making those improvements, usually with the help of technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and process automation solutions.
Whether or not a business wants to focus on improving profitability, every company can employ business process management techniques to improve workflows.
How Business Process Management Can Help Your Organization
The benefits of BPM include:
- More efficient use of resources
- Saving time
- Allowing staff to focus their skills and training on non-repetitive tasks
Its wise to employ BPM techniques regularly to ensure that your business is operating at peak performance. With this strategy, you can rest assured that your business will be optimized in line with changes in the business environment and the availability of new software and hardware.
Key Steps in Business Process Management
BPM can be divided into the following five key stages.
1. Goal setting
The first move in BPM is to decideor remind yourselfwhat is important to your business. BPM refers to several activities that work best when focused on an agreed, unifying goal.
A business objective might be something like providing services more promptly or saving money on deliveries. Whatever the goal, it helps to have a focus. A SMART, written objective provides a deadline and a measurable result with which to assess success.
2. Identify and Engage Stakeholders
BPM projects are more successful when people who make business decisions or have a vested interest in them understand the importance of the project. Their engagement, whether the stakeholders are individuals, groups, or organizations, can refine BPM and make the process work better.
3. Analysis
Before implementing BPM, you need to know exactly what you hope to change and how you will achieve it. This means analysis of your businesss current systems and processes.
It can be useful to make a flowchart or another pictorial representation of business processes for the whole lifecycle of your product or service. Look at how a process begins, what signifies the end, and everything and everyone involved in between those two points.
Analyzing process flow might help businesses understand how cumbersome their existing processes are. For others, especially those who have already performed BPM, this analysis may demonstrate that your business is already sufficiently light on its feet.
4. Design Automation and Other New Processes
At this stage, the firm will take a closer look at the technological solutions it can use to improve business processes. Improving might mean making processes faster, cheaper, more reliable, and more secure, or other benefits, depending on the businesss primary objectives.
Many BPM implementations lean on automation. Automating repetitive processes is an excellent way to improve accuracy and save money and time.
5. Re-Assessment and Improvement
Any new process requires assessment to understand its impact. BMP will deliver measurable results. To benefit from them, organizations must determine what metrics they will use for the measurement.
How to measure the effectiveness of BPM implementation should link back to the original objectives identified in Step 1.
Re-examining processes and tweaking them to further improve efficiencies should be a continuous activity. BPM is not about making one-off improvements to a businesss process flow but developing a culture in which processes are continuously monitored, assessed, and optimized.
Business Process Management Examples
Here are some examples of BPM in action to give you some idea of how to use it to enhance your business today.
- Digitizing Hard Copy Documents: Firms of all sizes still use legacy systems for daily tasks. While digitizing hard copy records also comes under digital transformation, its a big part of BPM, too. Tools like Salesforce, for example, help businesses create centralized, digital systems that can make day-to-day data processing activities more secure, reliable, and efficient.
- Chatbots: Most firms receive frequently asked questions. Responding to these queries by phone, email, or other messaging services takes time. Using programmable chatbots, however, frees up staff and offers customers accurate, pre-approved responses to common questions in real-time, 24/7, anywhere in the world.
Hubspots Chatbot builder is an exceptionally user-friendly chatbot that businesses can use to streamline this business process quickly. It can also serve as an introduction to the benefits of AI process automation that might lead to improvements in other business processes.
- Optimizing Recruitment Processes: Recruitment is a major business process that benefits from BPM. Take for example Leadar using AI to connect individuals and businesses with potential hires fast. It leverages new technology and draws on a significant database of potential employees to deliver efficiencies for individuals and businesses alike.
Recruitment also involves many repetitive tasks that do not require high levels of expertise and can detract from more high-level activities that require workers skills. Thus, HR automation software, such as Paradox, can filter out and respond to candidates very quickly and efficiently, allowing HR staff to focus on interviewing the most viable candidates.
Conclusion
There is a saying that if it aint broke, dont fix it. However, theres nothing wrong with a little business improvement. Just because something is working doesnt mean it cant or shouldnt be improved.
While employing BPM requires an initial investment of time and money, the potential payoff can be significant and long-lasting. A more efficient business that maximizes time and resources is good for staff, clients, the environment, and profit.