To get ahead of the competition, businesses should always look for ways to improve and streamline processes. Business process management (BPM) is a powerful method used for streamlining and optimizing your company’s business processes. Instead of focusing on the improvement of individual tasks, BPM focuses on your entire workflow to efficiently achieve corporate goals.

In this post, we’ll discuss BPM, why it’s important, the steps to using BPM, and the different types of process management.

What is BPM?

BPM is a process improvement methodology that breaks down the workflow of your business processes in an effort to streamline those processes for maximum efficiency. The aim is to analyze all the tasks and steps in the workflow so you can regulate the overall processes to quickly and efficiently reach goals without sacrificing quality. The idea is to increase agility and business performance through better use of tools, documentation, techniques, and best practices. 

A business can deal with inefficiencies only for a limited time. Small inefficiencies can become big problems down the road that lead to unnecessary costs, low quality, and unhappy customers. Adopting BPM methodologies and analyzing your processes and workflows can help you to find areas that need improvement. Using BPM to improve your business processes can help you stay a step ahead of your competition by eliminating waste and increasing quality output.

Why is BPM important?

Because the business landscape changes rapidly, it’s important to embrace BPM to help you to make the right adjustments that will keep you competitive in your market. BPM practices can help you to be:

• Efficient: BPM helps you to reduce bottlenecks and eliminate redundancies so your teams can work more efficiently.

• Agile: BPM can help you to adapt quickly to changing business environments and consumer attitudes.

• Consistent: BPM helps you develop standardized processes to ensure consistent quality and customer satisfaction.

• Strategically aligned: Use BPM to align your processes with strategic goals to ensure that everybody is on the same track.

What are the essential components of BPM?

Using BPM means that you are trying to understand your business processes. This understanding helps you to keep things running smoothly and helps you to look for ways to improve continuously. The following components of BPM are essential to help you to understand your processes:

• Process modeling: Map out your processes to give you a bird’s-eye view of the overall workflow. This helps you understand individual tasks, steps, assignments, and milestones to see potential bottlenecks, redundancies, and other potential problems so you can start to explore areas for improvement.

• Automation: Analyzing and understanding your processes helps you identify repetitive tasks that can be automated. This reduces manual effort and helps to minimize or eliminate errors. Automating repetitive processes can ensure better consistency and improve process efficiency.

• Execution and control: BPM gives you real-time visibility into process execution and status. This helps you ensure that processes are executed on schedule and that they follow predefined guidelines and rules.

• Measurement and optimization: BPM uses metrics and KPIs to evaluate process performance. These measurements can help you optimize your processes to meet your goals and customer expectations.

Types of BPM

There are three main types of BPM: integration-centric, human-centric, and document-centric.

Integration-centric BPM

The focus of this type of BPM is on processes that move between different systems with little human involvement. The idea is to ensure smooth data integration across various software applications, systems, and data sources.

Human-centric BPM

Unlike integration-centric BPM, this type focuses on tasks, activities, and skills that require human interaction, such as tasks that require review or approval before proceeding to the next step. 

Document-centric BPM

This type is focused on the management-specific documents that are of value to your organization, such as contracts and procurement documents. Document-centric process activities might include image scanning and collecting, document review or approval, signature gathering, reporting, etc. For example, healthcare centers that rely on medical reports and clinical tests might have document-centric BPM practices in place.

Business process management steps

Follow these six process management steps to optimize your company’s business.

Step 1: Planning

Work with management and key stakeholders to identify areas of your company that might not work as efficiently as possible. Interview the people involved in the processes, look at existing documentation, and observe the processes in action if possible. Become familiar with these processes so you understand how they start, the workflow of their tasks and steps, and what the end result should be. 

Document all of the steps, tasks, roles, inputs, outputs, etc., involved in these business processes. This can help you categorize the processes based on the three types of BPM so you can develop the right BPM strategy that aligns with your company’s goals.

Step 2: Designing and mapping

After identifying which business processes you want to improve, create visual process models. Lucidchart has everything you need to create flowcharts and diagrams to help you visualize how the processes currently work and how you would like them to work. Be sure to map the sequence of all process activities (tasks, steps, decision points, reviews, and other interactions).

Step 3: Modeling

Create a business process model that maps out the steps and procedures necessary to take the current processes to where you want them to go to effect positive improvement. This step also includes building and testing digital prototypes, if possible, to see how the processes run against various conditions that you might encounter in your business. 

Be sure to share your business process models and prototypes with stakeholders to get their feedback and buy-in.

Step 4: Implementation

After testing your models and getting the necessary buy-in, it’s time to implement the new processes. Don’t try to implement everything all at once. Create a deployment plan that implements process changes with smaller groups. This will let you find and address problems that might arise in real-world situations. When all the kinks are worked out, you can expand your implementation program.

Step 5: Monitoring

When the processes are up and running, monitor their real-time performance against your chosen metrics and KPIs. The data collected here will give you a good idea of how well the processes work and can help you identify anomalies, bottlenecks, and potential problems. Remember that BPM is a model for continuous improvement. This means that you are never “done.” You need to monitor your processes often to look for ways to improve.

Step 6: Optimizing processes

Based on the data you receive as you monitor processes and the feedback you get from the people using the processes, you’ll need to make refinements to ensure that work continues to flow smoothly.

Optimize your business with BPM

BPM is more than just managing business processes—it’s also about optimizing business operations and processes to be more efficient and consistent in your work. As you map and build your business process models, try using Lucidchart to create visual overviews of any type of process.