Introduction
As a business grows, every department "needs" to work together to ensure that the organization is going in the right direction and the goals are met — indicating collaboration and integration as the main key to success.
But, there's not "just one" process that you need to manage; there are plenty of them out there, which leads to complex business processes resulting in confusion, waste of resources and a massive disaster for the entire organization.
But don't stress; business process management (BPM) is there to save you!
Let's dive into some business process management examples to help you understand how.
TL;DR: Business process management examples
- Business process management (BPM) is a technique used to manage and enhance business processes.
- BPM helps businesses adjust to changing customer needs, improves security and compliance, and is cost-effective.
- Organizations need BPM for complex procedures, dynamic processes, and recurring tasks.
- Examples of BPM models include BPMN, RAD, flowcharts, and RID.
- The process of implementing BPM involves analyzing, modeling, executing, monitoring, and optimizing business processes.
What is business process management?
Business process management (BPM) is a technique used to manage and enhance particular business processes, a set of recurring actions businesses frequently take.
In order to optimize processes like employee onboarding or shipping, BPM typically involves steps like modeling, automation, optimization and measurement.
What is the difference between business process and business process management?
Let's first define what a process is.
A process is a collection of actions or tasks that can be repeated over and over by participants in order to accomplish a specific organizational goal. Think about employee onboarding, for instance. It includes things like:
- Filling out paperwork.
- Verifying documentation.
- Managing IT resources.
- Establishing a workstation.
- Introduction to the team members and other departments.
- Orientation.
- Training.
No matter how many employees you hire, every task is repetitive. The processes are "interrelated" because the outcome of one activity affects the outcome of the other.
However, how do you determine whether these procedures are effective?
According to Gallup, only 12 percent of employees believe their organization does a good job onboarding new team members, leaving 88 percent of workers with unsatisfactory onboarding experiences — indicating that there is room for improvement in how organizations onboard their new employees.
Understanding the current situation is the first step toward improvement; after that, consider how it may be streamlined, improved and finished more quickly.
This is where a BPM or business process management comes into play. It's a method used by the organization to examine present processes, identify potential areas for improvement, create a process improvement plan and then adapt them to increase their efficiency.
Why do you need business process management?
Here's why your business demands business process management:
1. It enables businesses to adjust to changing customer needs quickly
Digital processes give organizations additional flexibility and agility. Businesses should have certain precautions and systems in place to keep up with changing client needs and interests in today's market.
And business process management helps exactly with it. With the help of BPM, businesses can quickly and effectively change non-optimal processes that might be preventing them from progressing.
Businesses can build an infrastructure to push through and observe any new adjustments to function more efficiently as soon as they feel the need to do so by utilizing these types of tools and practices.
2. It results in improved security & easier compliance
Stakeholders have improved access to the processes at their company thanks to a BPM plan. Business process management is mostly dependent on following a process with a clear, accessible workflow supported by relevant documentation.
Because of this, it is simpler to keep up with changing compliance regulations. Additionally, its agility enables businesses to respond to evolving security risks. Your capacity to find and fix process problems that could compromise the security of your business is much easier and more streamlined with this type of management in place.
💡 Related resource: Workflow vs. Process: How to Streamline Business Operations
3. It's generally cost-effective.
Business process management helps your company's processes run more leanly by cutting out a lot of the fat, such as extra labor and maintenance costs for equipment. This is the main reason why many businesses choose to use business process management.
The BPTrends 2020 State of Business Process Management Report states that 69 percent of companies using BPM do so to save money by lowering expenses or boosting productivity.
Business process management ultimately focuses on maximizing efficiency by streamlining procedures that would otherwise be more costly and time-consuming.
When do you need to use business process management?
Organizations can create strong frameworks for each of their processes with the help of business process management. The probability of error is significantly reduced and process efficiency is raised when all processes are mapped, monitored and optimized.
However, the question is — do you need to implement business process management in your company? If so, when?
Here are some scenarios that indicate your company needs an adaptable and dynamic business process management system:
Complex business procedures that demand orchestration and departmental cooperation
The majority of the time, business processes are bidirectional. They necessitate collaboration between numerous divisions, business units and departments. The white space between departments, where work is lost or delayed, will be a problem for organizations with tightly compartmentalized processes.
Cross-departmental procedures like hiring new employees carry less risk, whereas operations like billing and expense reporting carry a higher risk of going wrong. By centralizing the process knowledge and data, BPM technologies assist you in orchestrating and optimizing the processes smoothly across departments.
Dynamic processes that require regulatory compliance changes
Company process compliance refers to ensuring that the business processes adhere to the relevant industry standards. Growing enterprises may find it challenging to ensure compliance because, when standards change, they must either adapt swiftly or face the consequences.
When laws or policies change, there is a higher risk of non-compliance. One example is when customer information management changes in response to new financial or privacy rules. Your company needs a business process management software or solution if you have trouble managing processes that frequently require compliance adjustments or have high-risk compliance laws.
Recurring tasks that require too much effort to complete manually
The main justification for putting business process management into place is that there are many repetitive and routine operations. Businesses have witnessed a commendable improvement in their balance sheets by simply substituting their excessively time-consuming and error-prone manual processes with fully automated workflows.
Whatever you manage to save by not switching to an automated model will go rapidly due to process irregularities and data accuracy problems. You can use BPM software to achieve end-to-end business process automation for increased productivity and process optimization.
Examples of different business process management models
Business process modeling is primarily used to visualize a workflow so that it can be understood, evaluated and improved.
Here are the 4 examples of business process management models:
1. Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)
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One of the most popular methods for modeling business processes is BPMN, which makes it simpler for management, employees and consultants to comprehend process maps by using standardized symbols.
It provides a standard notation that everyone can easily understand, helping them to analyze public and private business processes easily.
Businesses and organizations benefit from using BPMN because it helps them:
- Visualize business procedures
- Document processing
- Examine business procedures
- Talk about the procedures in everyday language.
2. Role Activity Diagrams (RAD)
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Roles are abstract descriptions of expected behavior in an organization. They frequently pertain to organizational activities. Software systems, clients and vendors are also included.
RADs offer an alternative viewpoint on the process and are particularly helpful in fostering communication. They give a detailed view of the process and permitting operations concurrently and are straightforward to read and simple to comprehend.
3. Flowchart Technique
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A flowchart is a diagram that shows the order in which choices must be made and the procedures that must be followed to complete a process. A diagram shape is used to label each step in the sequence. Connecting lines and directing arrows are used to link the steps.
This enables anyone to view the flowchart and logically follow the procedure from start to finish.
The ultimate goal of a flowchart is to communicate the steps in a process effectively and efficiently with proper design and construction.
4. Role Interaction Diagrams (RID)
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In order to give context to one or more system lifelines, role interaction diagrams concentrate on describing the flow of communications within a system.
In a variety of situations, interaction diagrams can be used to present a special collection of information. They can be applied to:
- Model a system as a timeline of events.
- Reverse or forward engineer a system or process.
- Organize the format of numerous interactive activities.
- Describe how messages and lifelines behave within a system.
- Determine any connections that might exist between the components of the lifeline.
How to build and implement your own business process management plan?
Here's your step-by-step process to create and implement your business management plan:
1. Analyze
You need to have a clear understanding of your processes before you can optimize them. That's why the first step in BPM is "Analyze" (also referred to as design).
Business analysts gain an understanding of the current process at this point and begin to sketch out what an ideal, effective new process should look like.
The key aspect of this phase is gathering data. Here, those in charge of a business process management initiative should investigate components like standard operating procedures, safety measures, notifications and the process flow to fully comprehend where the existing process stands and how it can be improved.
They must also ensure that any changes they make won't result in any substantial hiccups or process interruptions. A well-informed, data-supported preliminary design for a new process that stakeholders may support should result from all of those actions, presumably among others.
2. Model
A design created in the previous stage is evaluated and examined using more difficult numbers and forecasting information in the modeling stage, which makes it less theoretical and more practical and immediately usable.
This could entail including variables that could modify the process's circumstances, such as prospective changes in costs, volatility in the overall economic environment, or any other relevant elements.
3. Execute
The designed and modeled modifications to the process are implemented during the execution phase, which is also referred to as the implementation phase.
It frequently requires putting in a lot of work and teaching anybody who uses or participates in the process how to carry it out properly. Depending on the nature of the operation, this stage is typically supported by manual labor, automation, or a combination of the two.
4. Monitor
The execution of a business process is just the beginning. In reality, if done correctly, it shouldn't cease altogether because it's a continual effort. In order to understand how a process works and performs, it must be continuously tracked and observed. To detect and address any bottlenecks, glitches, or outright flaws, a business needs complete visibility into how a process is going.
For instance, after introducing a new tool integration for your customer service team, keep an eye on tool utilization. Are users utilizing the integration? Has your customer service team's manual labor decreased? If not, offer further training and support to promote adoption.
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5. Optimize
In this step, you need to fix all the faults that you've found during the monitor phase.
It's where companies put the data they gather from modifying a process' design to use. Similar to the previous step, it is usually an ongoing process.
Wrapping up: business process management examples
The processes you establish, manage and monitor will determine how successful your business operates. Despite how simple it may seem, these business process management examples show it requires hard work and expertise to build efficient business process management. But choosing Scribe can help you ease your path by making practical and "share-ready" guides for every process you need — giving you a competitive and visual edge. What's stopping you? Sign up for a free account with Scribe to document your business processes.
