BPM: What, Why and More

In the ever-evolving economy that we're in today, most businesses are pressured to perform with the limited resources available to them - which mandates them to continually evolve, redesign, implement and manage the processes that are employed to run the business.

Business Process Management (abbreviated as BPM) is a systematic approach to make an organization's workflow (processes) more effective, more efficient and more capable of adapting to an ever-changing environment. 

What BPM is all about? BPM is a way of optimizing organizational processes (in terms of effectiveness, cost management, sustainability, etc.). It is best thought of as a practice that seeks to continually identify, monitor and modify the existing processes so as to align with a presumably improved state of affairs. It works on the principle of "Continuous Improvement" (akin to the Japanese business philosophy "Kaizen").

Why embrace BPM? Businesses are incessantly challenged to keep pace with the dynamic economies (with regards to adapting to new gen customers, competitive needs, ever-changing regulatory requirements and/or evolving to provide unrivalled customer experiences). BPM can pitch in by providing:

• Improved Business Agility: One of the most definite hallmarks of a dynamic organization is its ability to transform with the changing marketplace requirements. BPM proposes designing of processes that are flexible - that can be easily customized to suit the requirements of the organization.
• Boosted Efficiency: BPM can facilitate automation of a lot of repetitive tasks within regular workflows. Improvements like removal of bottlenecks, introduction of parallel processing and elimination of redundant steps can easily be achieved with BPM, leading to increased productivity and reduced inefficiency.
• Optimizing Costs: Simply slashing budgets and downplaying the number of processes required is old school. A better strategy would be to streamline business operations, automate repetitive tasks and reduce risks. As advocated by BPM.
• Better Performance Tracking: Most BPM products are armed with reporting and analytics capabilities so that success monitoring can be done much faster than relying on spreadsheets and numerous files and documents, which, if done manually, can be riddled with errors, errors that can completely skew the statistics.
• Improved customer and staff delight:  BPM softwares usually have an allied 24/7 customer support - which can enable timely addressal of customer queries and pain points. It also brings with it a host of automation tools that can ease the everyday load of the back office staff, ultimately leading to higher satisfaction levels.

More about BPM: BPM should not be a one-time exercise. It should involve a continuous evaluation of the processes and include taking actions to improve the total flow of processes. This all leads to a continuous cycle of evaluating and improving the organization.

BPM platforms usually come with inbuilt knowledge management capabilities, a repository of business rules, social collaboration features, mobility, security and multiple deployment options.

Embedded processes—with BPM at its core— can not only automate processes to improve operational efficiency, but can also drive more growth, manage governance, risk and compliance, thereby improving customer and employee engagement.