Exploring the Advantages of Business Process Management

When successfully applied, BPM can improve business operations and create a companywide understanding of end-to-end processes. It leads to an increased transparency of those business operations, process comprehension and better and directed communication across departmental boundaries. There are three process-related areas, which are in focus for BPM.

Not every process requires an immediate improvement. Especially if it's related to a change of habits for people and their daily tasks, which should be changed as rarely as possible. Improvements must be evaluated and changes must be planned and prepared.

• Identify pain points and tasks in a process that require improvement
• Identify the right stakeholders of a process and evaluate areas for improvements together
• Prepare the change/training for process participants

Employees can only collaborate on processes and perform them, if they are documented and accessible. It is much more effective to document processes in a visual way to ensure that all relevant information can be grasped at a glance. No one likes reading a lot of text in a Word document to figure out what must be done in case x. This is where process modeling with BPMN 2.0 comes into play.

• Model and design processes in such a way that all relevant information can be grasped at a glance
• Structure processes
• Provide a drill-down navigation from the value chain to the actual process for the employee

In practice, very often a certain level of process transparency is even required for external certification (for example, ISO 9000) or to prove compliance with risk management regulations for banks.

For the implementation, the business processes must be transparently documented first. They are always performed in an end-to-end context.

• Implement processes into the company process structure (value chain)
• Publish them to all internal employees (in a process portal, like SAP Signavio Process Collaboration Hub
• Automate tasks/processes which have been done manually before

If applied correctly, BPM provides huge benefits to companies.

Here are the top seven:

1. Agility - The design of processes is quite flexible. Based on necessary changes to adjust to market needs, the impacted processes can be identified quickly due to a high process transparency.
2. Productivity - Process improvements like removal of bottlenecks, parallel processing, and elimination of redundant steps can be easily achieved with BPM.
3. Efficiency & Reduced Risks - The visibility of processes allows focusing on inefficiencies. It includes also checking uncovered risks and controls on certain tasks in a process - and adding them where necessary.
4. Compliance & Transparency - BPM ensures that organizations can implement regulatory requirements quickly. Compliance can be integrated easily into the process lifecycle, as visualized processes also reveal potential (or uncovered) risks.
5. Employee Satisfaction - BPM allows employees to focus 100% on their work as process automation cuts down a lot of repetitive work and makes it easier to access information.
6. Measurability - Due to its end-to-end process focus, processes can be compared to an expected result. This helps to streamline and quantify how well a process supports the operational business.
7. Technology Integration - BPM software solutions bridge the gap between IT and business users, thanks to process modeling standards like BPMN 2.0. The focus is not only on integrating systems applications anymore, but equally on processes along with applications to accomplish the overall process goal.