How to Implement BPM in Your Company?
Reading time: 5 minutes
Reading time: 5 minutes
Processes are the ‘vascular system’ of any enterprise. They permeate every business unit, department, or team and define overall business performance. There’s hardly anything as frustrating as running or working in a company with inefficient, malfunctional processes. Business process management (BPM) is, therefore, a crucial component of a smoothly functioning and sustainable enterprise.
Proper BPM implementation might take a lot of time and effort, but there’s little sense in trying to rush it since it will only lead to poor adoption and inefficiency. Today, we will share some tips on how to build a robust BPM system for your business.
Before you start implementing a BPM system, make sure you have a clear understanding of your current state of the art. Even if processes in your company are inefficient and unoptimized at the moment, there’s some basis to start with. By documenting your processes, you can better understand where the bottlenecks are and what has to be done to improve.
Another important thing to consider is figuring out how these processes correspond to your business goals, and if they don’t – make sure you need them in the first place. For those processes that prove to be indispensable or beneficial, check if BPM implementation is going to work. In other words, make sure these processes can be automated at all or will improve when automated. So, as you can see, there’s a certain amount of preparatory work to be done.
Business process management solutions are used to create, visualize, manage and monitor processes. Various tools offer different functionality – some of them are just designed to improve planning while others can be integrated with other software and used as a control center.
When choosing a BPM solution, consider whether it will be used by IT specialists, business users, or both (which is often the case). A BPM system should have a user-friendly interface and shouldn’t require sophisticated technical skills from business users – otherwise, you’ll have to spend too much time and effort on training employees. On the other hand, turnkey solutions often lack functionality and flexibility. So, perhaps it would be a good idea to adopt a low-code BPM system like Workflow Engine that can be easily adjusted to your company’s needs and used by employees without a large technical background.
As you have your BPM software installed, it’s time to model your workflows. It’s crucial that you work in close cooperation with all the stakeholders involved in the process management. So make sure to identify an owner for each process you’re dealing with. Usually, it’s a supervisor, a department head or a team lead who is responsible for the functioning and managing the process and data.
When mapping your processes in the BPM system, consider breaking them down into individual tasks to make the scheme more precise. It’d be also helpful to visualize data flows associated with the processes as well as the employee roles involved and connections between them.
To get an idea how a newly developed workflow might impact your business process without messing with your ongoing work, run it in a test environment first. This is a perfect way not only to safely test your hypothesis but also train employees to use the BPM system.
Moreover, prior testing of the software possibilities can help you make the most of it since you will be able to check the system runtime, its capabilities to handle multiple processes, convenience, and performance.
If you’re aimed at maximizing the efficiency of your business processes, get ready for an ongoing cycle of measuring performance and taking steps to improve it. To do so, you’ll need to define what types of data and figures you want to measure and monitor how they’re changing over time. This falls into the domain of end-to-end analytics, but you can start with tracking a few of the most crucial KPIs associated with the process you’re estimating.
If you find out that your objectives are not met, you’ll need to adjust the process. It might take some time until your BPM system is completely fine-tuned and enables faster and more efficient workflows.
Business process management gets more and more complicated as your business grows. To prevent it from becoming a real mess, make sure to adopt a reliable solution that will help you orchestrate your processes and make them more efficient as well as enable performance tracking and, thus, allow for an ongoing improvement.