Why Your Organisation Should Implement Business Process Management (BPM)

Business process management is a methodology that identifies and improves existing business processes continually. It isn't exactly a piece of technology, but there's software on the market, such as automation or artificial intelligence, that naturally comes under the umbrella of ‘BPM solution’.

business process management

BPM is a process of optimisation - an area of particular value as companies aim to gain competitive advantage through use of technology. We’ll look at why so many companies have found success by implementing business process management, including:

Why Have Businesses Turned to BPM?

BPM is a crucial practice for successful companies. While it does require adoption of automation for successful improvement of business processes, it isn’t reliant on one single practice. Rather, it’s a methodology that automation and tech innovations form a part of. 

So why have so many businesses turned to using BPM?

Elimination of Siloed Working

Core departments never work with the same tech stack or protocols. Despite working independently, departments can inevitably lose sight of the dependencies they rely on. When this happens, problems follow. 

What organisations have needed is visibility, and this is what BPM has been able to provide them.

As an analytical process, BPM strategies have been implemented to find causes of concern and sourcing solutions. This analysis can be done company-wide, meaning every employee becomes a stakeholder in the solution. It also means they acknowledge and understand other departments' issues. 

Onboarding of New Technologies

As leaders strive to provide frictionless IT systems, BPM has been shown to provide  an overview of their needs, making it easier to introduce the right technical solutions. 

Whether looking into artificial intelligence or even augmented reality, companies have been able to assess a solution’s impact using BPM. This has allowed early  communication of benefits to their wider team to promote internal buy-in before rollout.

Capturing Continuous Improvement

BPM has allowed companies to base decisions on data-driven insights allowing that support smaller, incremental improvements to be made, when improving processes. Alongside these smaller steps,  promoting employee engagement also remains a key factor in driving change, made easier by the adoption of automation. Read more on automation and how it improves the employee experience, here. 

Improving Efficiency

As companies more accurately manage their processes, it becomes clear which areas require more attention and where efficiency might be lacking.

Efficiency can be captured in several ways:

  • Analysing business processes in granular detail.
  • Onboarding automation technology, such as Robotic Process Automation.

As BPM analyses, restructures, monitors and automates, where real structural change is possible becomes evident. 

What Does Successful BPM Require?

Employing BPM ensures that companies have improved their processes as much as possible before implementing any automation. Onboarding automation too soon could otherwise result in infrastructural issues multiplying faster. 

We recommend:

  • Improving all existing processes, rather than trying to overhaul the entire system. 
  • Standardising processes to improve consistency and identifying  any issues
  • Assign ownership of related tasks. 
  • Enable continuous improvement so positive change can be extended and long-lasting. 

When companies use BPM, they do so as an ongoing discipline involving a continuous evaluation of processes and the overall working environment. BPM will continue to accurately measure business performance and reveal if, and where, automation is needed.

Using BPM, companies have seen lasting improvements that haven’t come in the form of huge, costly projects that require complete restructuring of the company. While processes may have been adequate, BPM and automation are able to push them to the next level.

The Value of BPM for ITSM

ITSM champions seek out the links between obstacles, bottlenecks, business objectives and tech solutions. In scenarios where IT departments don’t even realise there’s an issue and it becomes a case of not being able to fix what you can’t see, a mix of using BPM and harnessing ITSM innovations provides a solution to this problem.

ITSM leaders implement BPM by viewing it as a complete and continuous process to onboard either specific pieces of software or identify workforce skills required to combat any issues identified.

BPM’s value in relation to ITSM is that it can be considered a holistic approach, in that it can discover where there is scope for ITSM solutions to be implemented. 

How Automation and ITSM Solutions Drive Successful Change

Now we’ve looked at why BPM as a methodology is particularly complimentary when used alongside ITSM, find out more about the concrete solutions and specific kinds of software that can improve your company’s performance and employee experience. 

We’re big believers in improving work via a process-based approach for end-users. After all, your employees are the heart of your company. When they’re empowered and able to focus on the important work and make data-driven decisions,  your entire business benefits.

To explore just how automation can do this, click this link for your free guide.