Business Process Management

Processes lie at the core of every business. They are central to every department and team across an organization and are critical to business workflows and outcomes. A business process management software is a process automation tool that helps organizations better manage their processes and workflows. It aims to increase efficiency, agility, and output in daily business operations.

Organizations can model, analyze, monitor, optimize, and automate workflows with business process management software. It helps improve business activities’ functionality and efficiency by removing redundant steps, doing away with paper-based and manual work steps, and eliminating bottlenecks and inefficiencies. As a result, BPM helps business users generate a tremendous competitive advantage by cutting costs, ensuring process excellence, and continuous process improvement.

BPM platforms have seen wide adoption by enterprises globally and are an intuitive must-have for any organization seeking to remain competitive in today’s modern digital world.

The term Business Process Management Suite was first coined by the Analyst firm Gartner in the 2000s to refer to software that handles process modeling and management. The focus of businesses was primarily cost reduction and improving process efficiencies, and BPM software perfectly catered to this need. However, with time, the focus of organizations shifted from cost

reduction to customer-centricity, and the traditional BPM software evolved to include capabilities like analytics and complex event processing to accommodate the dynamic needs of business users. Gartner coined the term Intelligent Business Process Management Suite for these newly evolved BPM tools.

Today, the need to deliver a better customer experience and holistic customer journeys sets the context for automation and technology investment. BPM continues to evolve, and several new acronyms are out in the market today, such as digital process automation, workflow automation, and intelligent process automation, with a broader scope than a BPM suite. In addition, organizations today want to change their processes to enhance collaboration, support, and innovation, which can help them deliver an excellent customer experience. As a result, the BPM of the future is more advanced and powerful than ever before. Equipped with user-friendly dashboards, low code, drag and drop interfaces, artificial intelligence, and robotic process automation (RPA), the evolved, modern-day BPM is at the center of digital transformation.

Relying on traditional BPM software can slow down your organization and render you less competitive. Here are the reasons why you must upgrade your BPM:

• Traditional BPM is hard-coded. Making changes on the fly is difficult
• Modern low code or no code BPM systems lend speed and agility
• Intelligent automation with the latest technologies is the need of the hour
• Employees expect real-time collaboration
• Rapid application development reduces time-to-market
• Automation of mundane tasks with Robotic Process Automation
• Massive improvement in employee productivity and workflow management
• Enhanced visibility across processes
• Quicker resolution of process bottlenecks with 360-degree insights
• Increased scalability takes care of future business needs
• Enhanced customer experience and engagement
• Continuous process improvement
• Accelerated revenue growth

Listed here are 14 critical considerations for selecting an ideal business process management software:

• Easy modeling of processes and forms
• Orchestration capability
• Web-app development (UI designer)
• Business rules configuration
• Dynamic use case and project management
• Content and document management
• Analytics, metrics, and process insights
• Choice of On-premises or cloud deployment
• Mobile optimization
• Social collaboration features
• Integration capability with other systems
• Scalability
• Administrator features and role-based access control
• Robotic process automation
• Dynamic task checklist
• Collaboration tools, connectors, and templates

Business process reengineering is one of the application areas of BPM, which aims to recreate or redesign business processes to optimize cost and improve efficiency.

Organizations can automate team, departmental, and enterprise-wide business processes using a BPM framework. For example – banks have automated and standardized new borrower onboarding processes. Insurance companies use BPM to automate claims management. Some other notable examples would be –

• Employee Onboarding
• Vendor Onboarding
• Leave Approval
• Expense Approval
• Claims Processing
• Retail Lending
• Corporate Lending
• Trade Finance
• Customer Onboarding
• Task Management, etc

Business Process Automation offers organizations multiple benefits, ranging from cost reduction to time savings. Automation of processes leads to standardization, traceability, and compliance. Automated processes help improve the output quality, employees’ productivity, and turnaround time.