What to Look for When Choosing Business Process Management Software
Reading time: 4 minutes
Reading time: 4 minutes
The business process management (BPM) global market value was estimated at 8.8 billion U.S. dollars in 2020. It’s expected to reach 14.4 billion U.S. dollars by 2025. There are multiple reasons for this. Here are the primary ones:
First, around 70% of companies implement BPM solutions to reduce costs or improve productivity, a report by Signavio shows.
Second, the consistent growth of the demand for process automation around the world reasonably increases the need for BPM solutions. This, in turn, provokes vendors to enhance services as their solutions help organizations to thrive and stay competitive.
Third, COVID-19 exposed companies’ vulnerabilities and also boosted the demand for automated solutions. Work from home, in particular, requires secure and efficient business processes.
Therefore, proper BPM solutions steadily become an integral part of entire organizations’ systems. To determine whether the solution is worth the investment and improves essential metrics, let’s look at the key features you should pay attention to when choosing BMP software.
It’s crucial to choose and test several options to estimate how adaptable and compatible they are with your company’s business scenarios and needs.
The time spent on learning how to use the solution and your employees’ expertise should also be taken into account, as the more complex software requires additional technical knowledge and time. Considering that employee turnover at some point is inevitable, it’s better to focus on simple solutions for non-technical users to learn and adapt to.
Most probably, you'll need to adapt the product according to your business processes, so it’s important to consider how customizable the preferred solution is.
At a certain point, you may decide to fine-tune your software. Therefore, the BPM solution should be extensible (e.g. with the help of plugins). Likewise, vendors can offer necessary modifications along the way or provide a source code. For example, Workflow Engine, a BPM automation software, provides a source code, so companies can customize and make changes without any restrictions on the vendor’s side.
The same applies to business process design interface. It should be user-friendly so that your employees are satisfied while working with it. If you need to change the interface of the software, so that it corresponds to the interfaces of other products, vendor-provided source code is essential.
However, keep in mind that if you purchase an open-source solution, your employees should possess some technical knowledge to adapt and customize it to your needs.
Make sure to learn the product documentation and usage examples thoroughly. Incomplete or confusing documentation is a significant disadvantage.
Moreover, software should be sophisticated enough and up-to-date. If it’s not being updated regularly, most probably the development is “on hold.” Choosing such an option is risky as you’ll have to resolve any issues by yourself. There are tools like Workflow Engine that offer a perpetual license. It means that you only pay once and use the current version forever, while a one-year updates subscription is included.
A chosen software should integrate well with the database your company exploits. If it’s not the case, you’ll have to start using another database and find specialists who can work with it and provide technical support.
Workflow Engine, for example, supports both SQL and NoSQL databases, such as MS SQL Server, SQL Azure, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, MongoDB, CosmosDB and Redis.
Without professional customer support, the solution will be hard and inconvenient to exploit. Moreover, it allows vendors to better understand users’ needs and implement demanded features faster.
Purchasing software without testing it is risky as only real-time results are relevant. To make sure the solution meets your business needs, it’d be wise to try it first.
BPM software automates repetitive tasks, minimizes errors and manages essential processes according to preferred logic. Therefore, BPM has the ability to improve overall efficiency and reduce excessive expenditures. Make sure to choose the right one by evaluating the fundamental features described in the article.