A company’s focus on its customers is essential while satisfying customer needs with excellent products and services is a must. The areas of marketing, innovation, and productivity play an important role as determinants of corporate strategy in order to use the company’s resources profitably.
Different concepts for corporate strategies try to explain why some companies succeed better than others in satisfying customer benefits and realizing competitive advantages. The resource-oriented corporate strategy describes that it is above all the company’s core competencies that distinguish successful from less successful companies.
They are core competencies if resources are valuable, have limited availability, and cannot be imitated. If business processes are themselves core competencies, they are called core processes. Core processes transfer resources to core competencies and thereby generate competitive advantages.
Business process management enables targeted control of business processes and focuses on meeting customer needs. The main aim of business process management is to optimize business processes. Business process management itself has several forms, including business process reengineering. Customer relationship management is a parallel discipline.
When introducing business process management in a company, there are three steps to follow: process analysis, process design, and anchoring new processes in the company. When new approaches are anchored, the future organization must be defined, which can range from functional organization to matrix organization to pure process organization.
Optimization and standardization of business processes can also help to increase the performance of business processes. Upstream and downstream measurement of business process performance can show whether they actually contribute. However, the use of methods for measuring the performance of business processes should be weighed upon a company-specific basis due to the effort involved.
What is Business Process Management (BPM)?
Business Process Management is the method in which a company sets up, models, executes, monitors, and optimizes all recurring processes. Business process management is a significant task that encompasses all parts of an organization and is divided into countless aspects.
It is therefore advisable to break down BPM into smaller tasks and define a clear goal. The distinction between operational and strategic process management is particularly important. Because while strategic process management has the big picture in mind and looks at things from a higher-level perspective, operational process management deals with day-to-day business and ongoing activities.
Strategic process management can be broken down as follows:
Integration-oriented Business Process Management
Integration-oriented BPM focuses on the software side of the business. How can your software solutions work together to save time, share information and data, and improve collaboration between everyone involved? These are the typical questions that integration-oriented BPM solves.
Human-centered Business Process Management
While integration-oriented BPM is essential for automated processes, some tasks cannot be performed solely by machines – the HR hiring process would be an example of such a business process. While integration-oriented BPM aims to optimize and automate software-related processes, human-centered BPM aims to optimize people-related workflows and business processes.
Document-centered Business Process Management
Creating documents of any kind takes longer than most companies can actually afford. After all, planning and creating content and reviewing and approving content can be time-consuming and require a lot of resources. Document-centered BPM aims to implement this process better.
Importance of Business Process Management
Economic changes and technological developments force companies to constantly grapple with their own market position and the resulting business processes. The added value of companies is based to a large extent on their business processes and their mapping in IT. An improvement in company processes can lead to increases in performance and quality and thus to competitive advantages. Against this background, many companies are developing active business process management in order to be able to effectively adapt their own processes to market requirements.
It turns out that the need to rethink processes increases with the dynamism of an industry. Overall, domains such as telecommunications or automobile production have reconsidered their processes more often than administrative units, for example, which have only been reorganizing processes under the heading of eGovernment for a few years, or the so-called creative sector, in which end-to-end IT support currently still plays a subordinate role. In these economic sectors, in particular, the potential of professional business process management is very high.
What are the Paybacks of Business Process Management for a Company?
Although BPM is a long-term and complex task, it should be approached in every company. Because the benefits far outweigh the time and effort required and can still be felt years later. In the following section, we summarize some aspects of which BPM can help your company perform at its best, and the process execution can be significantly improved.
Optimized workflows across the company
Regardless of whether you are considering integration-centric, people-centric, or document-centric BPM, the main goal of a BPM process is always to optimize your business processes as much as possible. The automated workflow management helps your company to increase your company performance at lower costs and to reduce the error rate.
Increased productivity
When you have established a clear structure for all of your business processes, each team member involved automatically increases their productivity. Everyone gains the ability to produce more without having to increase input. Automation can make a huge difference in your company.
Consistent and high-quality work results
Business process management leads to better work results: your error rate drops, while you can improve consistency and quality. This applies to products and services, marketing assets, data and information, and all other results from your business processes.
Increased availability of internal resources
Integration-oriented BPM contributes to brand asset management by using digital asset management (DAM) systems. This systems lead to better collaboration within and between organizations and ensure that your marketing content is consistent at all levels.
Better collaboration inside and outside the company
Optimizing business processes and increasing efficiency requires optimized collaboration within teams, management functions and organizations.
As you may have noticed by now, business process management is a comprehensive method used in many successful organizations. If carried out correctly, the results of BPM are flawless and visible for years to come.
How Does Business Process Management Work? The five BPM steps at a glance
Let’s go into the five steps of business process management in more detail and explain them in detail.
1. Planning and Analysis
Unless you are starting a business from scratch, business processes and workflows already exist that can be optimized. The first step is the analysis of existing methods. You will analyze which business processes most urgently need improvement and put together a ranking of the priorities.
First, examine the most common weaknesses in your company. Questions can arise, such as: Why does document management take so much time? Then write down all the activities and steps of the existing business process so that you have a clear overview of how process management is currently working. You can first use business case templates to get an initial overview of the relevant tasks and to see where the weak points of the business processes lie.
You should also define key performance indicators (KPIs) with which you can measure the success of the business process and identify improvements in the individual activities.
2. Modeling
Once all the steps in current processes are outlined, there is a need to learn more about why each step is performed this particular way. In the modeling stage, you think about how you can improve each business process. Regardless of what process you need to optimize, automation should be paramount. You should be able to answer the question: How can I get more output with the same or even less input? The answer is most likely: automation.
Safeway shows an example of successful process automation. The company switched from paper-based to digital workflows using frevvo software to save time, reduce costs and reduce errors in their processes.
Instead of big changes, you can consider small approaches: Do all team members really need to attend weekly meetings? Or can resources be saved by only inviting direct stakeholders ?
Questions like these should consider in the modeling phase, which usually results in a visual representation of the new business processes.
3. Implementation
After the modeling comes to the implementation, here you test the newly developed business processes with a small test group, depending on the size of the changes before you fully commit yourself to the new plan and the new definition. For example, if you think your review and approval process needs to be tweaked, you can try Filestage’s free trial and demo first. This saves you time and money and may help you achieve your goals more quickly.
Regardless of how innovative your planning phase is, you can be sure that the new process will contain unpredictable challenges that can only be uncovered during a real field test. The implementation is, therefore, a test phase in which theory and practice meet. As a rule, several test rounds are carried out, and further adjustments are made before the final definition of the business process is determined.
4. Monitoring
How can you make sure the new process is better than the old one? By making your BPM process measurable with data. The key performance indicators (KPIs) are already defined in the planning phase, and the information is collected and evaluated during the monitoring phase. Because management will be very interested in the results, your KPIs and data will, of course, vary based on the business outcomes you want.
For example, if you want the marketing team to deliver consistent content, monitor whether the new process leads to fewer design mistakes. If a lack of efficiency is your main problem, then you can assess whether the new changes are delivering more output.
Monitoring the processes is a continuous activity. It shows the improvements that result from your BPM processes. It is, therefore, important that your team agree on meaningful KPIs and pursue the same goals.
5. Optimization
Good business process management is not a one-off intervention but a need for continuous work. Therefore, the optimization stage can be seen as a repetition of the last four phases. Even if you have perfectly planned and implemented new processes, you must continuously monitor the results in order to optimize your business processes over the long term and achieve your goals. If you do not regularly analyze, review, and optimize your business processes, errors or inefficiencies can recur.
