Which is the best BPM for my business?

You’ve probably already heard that your company needs to improve their process execution. In an environment that gets more competitive day by day, the greatest challenge companies must face is increasing their productivity, but this factor is not enough either nowadays. Today, companies must be intelligent and agile, as only the ones able to adapt to the market and improve constantly their processes will have possibilities to overcome their competitors.

In this context, you may have seen the word BPM somewhere by now. If you don’t really know what is this about, in this article we’ll try to help you understand what it is and how can it help with efficiency in commercial processes.

What is a BPM?

BPM means Business Process Management, and it’s a methodology of management that applies certain techniques and elements to improve processes in companies.

The first thing we must do is identify our existing processes and getting to know their workflow. After that, we should analyze the mistakes in these processes and, finally, suggest improvements or modifying the processes so they become more effective. It looks easy, right? It is!

Companies have always had concerns on optimizing their processes, this is nothing new. The concept BPM appeared in the early 2000 thanks to the book Business Process Management – The Third Wave. Since it launched, this method is being implemented in some of the biggest international organizations, and in some of the not that big ones too.

What is, then, a BPMS?

… What is, then, a BPMS?

We tend to mistake BPM for BPMS (Business Process Management System). What is the difference, apart from the “s” at the end?

Let’s make here a small parenthesis before continuing.

When we talk about a BPM we must take into account its three dimensions; the created value, which is the core of any company, that is, its business; the transformation, every process that allows it to add this value; and the management, which allows it to coordinate the people and resources so they are aligned in the creation of this value.

While a BPM refers to the process management discipline, the latter refers to the software that helps automatize the whole flow of information and tasks, which will have been identified in the design process. Technology is nothing more than a catalyst that will implement these three dimensions in an organization.

With process automation, some activity flows that could last 4 hours are reduced to one. Besides, this software provides a quick and precise access to information, helping the responsible people of the process take better decisions and act consequently in real time, reducing the time-to-market.

Which are the benefits of a BPM?

To sum it up, we could say that a BPM allows companies to execute tasks in a more reliable way, making less mistakes and in less time. If we go into detail, we can say that specific benefits of a PBM can be divided in three categories:

• Efficiency: One of the first benefits a company usually notices when implementing a BPM is higher efficiency. After all, many processes are full of mistakes in the beginning due to the human factor, a deficient communication, etc. A BPM helps companies eliminate these inefficiencies and this only benefits the final results.
• Effectiveness: once the process becomes efficient, the BPM can be used to make it more effective as well. Among the several benefits that effectiveness brings we find the ability of managing exceptions properly, improving our decision-making process and the capacity of consistently executing these actions, which is crucial to satisfy the client. When all the processes are executed in an effective way and they are aligned with the corporative strategies and objectives, companies become more competitive and profitable.
• Agility: As we said in the beginning of the article, in such a competitive business world, a company has the urge to become agile and react quickly to the market’s needs. In fact, companies with inflexible processes will probably become obsolete. The need for a change can come from anywhere, from inside the organization or from outside, as new opportunities require flexibility if we want to capitalize them. New clients can require changes too, so flexibility is a must.

Which BPM should I choose?

A question that may come to your mind is “which is the best BPM for my company?”, and the answer is, of course, it depends. As we said before, technology is only a facilitator, an infrastructure to base the implementation of the BPM, and this is why the real question is not which software is the best, but which software will adapt better to my company’s needs.

Discovering the best solution, with the best value for money, requires an analysis that goes further than just taking into account the functionalities of the solution. Before choosing a BPM we must ask ourselves these questions:

• What is the size of the company in terms of users and integrated systems in the business processes, and which is our growth perspective for the next years?
• How is the company structured – is it centralized or is it dispersed in different locations? Which is the impact of the automatized processes on the users? Do we need the software to be multi-currency and multi-language?
• Does the IT infrastructure of the company already have technological platforms where the solution can be implemented?
• What else does the company need from this software apart from simple automation of the process steps? Monitoring and actions in real time? Autonomy in the architecture of the business processes? Can I have all this in a single software or will I need multiple tools to cover my whole improvement cycle?

Recommendations

To sum it up, BPM’s benefits are easy to understand, but as its implementation is not trivial, and choosing the technology is not either, we’ll give you some advice so you can choose a good one:

• Think about your processes: Design your processes, take all the tasks into account and try to automatize everything that doesn’t add any value. Qualify your primary processes, those that are relevant for the business. Sometimes it’s counter-productive to try and improve all the processes at the same time.
• Choose well your team: One of the success factors are actually people. Those who will be users but also the decision-makers in the process. They will all have to comprehend the business and the processes.
• Technology: The technology can vary a lot depending on the provider. You should do a benchmarking and choose the one that better satisfies your company’s needs and wishes. Vincle has a BPM in its platform so you can see better your processes in every commercial activity, which allows you to customize the treatment to every client.
• The value of the business: The goal of any BPM is adding value and making the business grow; take a look at the business with the eyes of your client.
• Measuring: You can’t improve what you can’t measure. This is a crucial point in process management; define the indicators that will accelerate your decision-making process.