Did you know that the average American employee wastes around 21.8 hours per week?
This is a lot of time to spend on meaningless tasks, but fortunately, there are ways that you can streamline business operations. Business process management is one of the top workflow automation strategies to save you and your employees time, money, and the potential for human error.
Read on to learn more about this optimization process and why it matters to you.
What Is Business Process Management?
Business process management (BPM) automates the processes that improve an organization’s workflow. These processes include data analysis, modeling processes, monitoring the improved processes, and constantly looking to optimize and upgrade them.
Contrary to popular belief, BPM isn’t something that you can implement once and then be done with. It’s an ongoing activity that requires constant reassessment and reengineering. It works to streamline the ways that you achieve your business and organizational goals in an ever-changing world.
It’s important to note that BPM is not a specific automation technology. While it does usually involve automating various tasks, it’s a mindset and methodology that lets people streamline operations. This can happen with or without technology.
A Step-by-Step Guide to BPM Implementation
Most experts view BPM as a 5-step process. All of these steps lead to the eventual implementation and optimization of a strategy to streamline overall operations.
The steps of the BPM life cycle often are referred to as designing, modeling, executing, monitoring, and optimization. However, some experts change the names. Nevertheless, the execution remains the same.
Designing
In this stage, experts within the business determine the way that business processes would function in an ideal world. They then design a model for what strategies should be implemented to achieve the closest possible world to this ideal. This means analyzing the current processes, identifying what must be done to improve them, and designing a strategy for optimization.
Modeling
It’s now time to consider the way that your business operates in various common scenarios. What does it do correctly in common situations? What are your greatest areas for improvement?
Answer these questions and come up with ways that you could solve your biggest pain points. Then come up with a model for their implementation so you know exactly how to proceed.
Executing
Once you have a plan, you can implement new processes and solutions. These processes improve standard process automation, which is likely what most people first think of when considering BPM.
You need to find technologies that manage your processes effectively. You also need to come up with ways to streamline operations with insight into new and improved systems. Essentially, this is the stage where you put new strategies in place so that you can assess how they work.
Monitoring
At this straightforward stage in the BPM process, you track and monitor how the strategies you’ve executed are working. You might use various tools to perform this task such as Google Analytics or machine monitoring solutions. This will inform you of whether your optimized plan works in reality.
Optimization
After you know how your newly implemented plan is working, you can optimize the process to better resolve your pain points.
This might mean using new automation technologies. It might mean speeding up processes with a stronger network. Optimization can take many forms.
As we touched on earlier, process automation isn’t something that you can do once and forget about. You constantly will need to repeat the entire process with the end goal of optimizing it further. This will ensure that your operations are always up-to-date and as fast and efficient as possible.
Why Is This Beneficial?
There are a plethora of ways that BPM can benefit your business.
First, it constantly and continuously delivers improvements to your business. Technologies are always changing and business operations must move with them to keep up. When you constantly monitor and manage your projects, you get to reap the benefits of the latest best practices.
You Make More Money
Streamlining your operations provides you with a plethora of practical and financial benefits.
You save money on training when you automate processes. People can focus on aspects of their job that you hire them to do including innovation about core products. You also will save money because you won’t be exporting funds to do inefficient operations (or to solve errors related to inefficiency).
You can also perform your jobs more quickly and accurately. This gives other employees and clients the results that they expect in a timely manner.
An impact of this is that you will have the chance to build a positive reputation within your industry. You’ll get more positive reviews and therefore more clients.
You Can Better Respond to Customer Demands
Speaking of giving customers what they want, BPM can help you recognize these demands and respond quickly to preferences. Processes themselves are recently becoming more focused on the customer than on pure productivity. People now ask how to better meet client needs.
You can therefore improve processes to meet these demands. Making these modifications also leads to other important changes that upgrade your productivity and overall efficiency.
Get Started
Now that you know all about business process management and how it can benefit your enterprise, it’s time to get started, Contact Collavate with any remaining questions that you have about process automation and how you can implement these tools.
We’re happy to tell you about the features, trials, and demos that we offer so that you can see our services in action. We also can discuss pricing and other logistics to ensure that you get the best services at an affordable rate. Since we’re committed to helping streamline your workflow, we look forward to getting in touch.