what is Business Process Management and why you should implement it in your company
Today’s marketplace is increasingly competitive, fast-paced and volatile. Consumers have become more demanding, they expect to get (quickly!) products or services tailored to their needs. From a business point of view, this scenario represents a demanding challenge that, if properly addressed, holds excellent business opportunities.
In today’s ultra-competitive business world, therefore, the need for a company to be agile is more urgent than ever: there is no doubt, in fact, that companies with obsolete and inflexible processes are destined to lag behind the trends and changes introduced by the digital revolution.
Improving business performance requires fluid, efficient and effective processes, both in operational and support processes. In short: Business Process Management.
Let’s take a look at what it is and all the benefits it brings within a company.
Business Process Management: what does it mean?
Many business processes are inefficient and ineffective due to a number of factors, such as manual effort, poor interdepartmental handoff and a general inability to effectively monitor overall progress.
Organizing work by processes means creating new value and bringing about a cultural change in the company, which is fundamental for the survival and growth of the enterprise. Therefore, adopting Business Process Management technologies means initiating an innovative approach to achieving one’s objectives, in order to speed up workflows and increase productivity at sustainable costs; in this way, the organization becomes flexible to continuous market changes and, above all, more competitive.
Business Process Management, therefore, refers to a model capable of speeding up and simplifying the management of business processes. How? By monitoring them in such a way as to allow managers to better analyze and understand where and when to intervene to improve the technology and the organization on the basis of concrete data.
Business Process Management: what it is and how it works
Shifting the focus from functions to processes to create a new management approach within the production process, the goal of Business Process Management is to simplify task management and improve business performance.
To do this, it is necessary to implement a series of activities – included in the BPM paradigm – aimed at optimizing resources and costs, speeding up operations, streamlining operational dynamics, eliminating redundant activities and extracting maximum value from the information flows circulating within the company. In short, according to the logic of Business Process Management, we stop reasoning aprioristically to evaluate the functioning of the process within the actual reality, more complex and variable, made of a constant and continuous collaborative exchange between the various actors involved in the various activities.
By monitoring process execution according to these principles through advanced data analysis, Business Process Management allows to constantly review activities based on objective and real information. In this way you have full visibility of the responsibilities of the individual operators involved and it is therefore possible to intervene on individual steps, improving activities and correcting any critical points.
Benefits of BPM in practice
The advantages brought by the Business Process Management system within the production process are therefore multiple and have an impact of immediate effectiveness on the activities in progress. In a market that leaves less and less room for errors and slowdowns, for example, the possibility of assessing the feasibility of a project before putting it into action – foreseeing strengths and weaknesses in relation to the investments to be made and the materials to be used for its realization – represents an added value that can make the difference for the success of the business.
The possibility of sharing qualitatively relevant information and of being able to count on a communicative approach based on interaction, moreover, guarantees the maximum speeding up of the decision-making process (thanks to targeted and effective analyses and to a fluid and immediate information exchange, without the obstacle of silos, between the different parties involved). Not only: the possibility of having access to the technical documentation in a simple and secure way, allows one to have full knowledge of the processes that have taken place (also) with a view to future optimization.
Value of strategy in a BPM plan
For businesses, being competitive in such a competing landscape means being able to operate quickly, maintain high levels of flexibility, and minimize the scope for slowdowns and errors through strategic management of business processes.
But why is strategy so important in a BPM plan?
- Strategy: defines the long-term direction of the enterprise, articulating what the enterprise will do to compete and succeed in its chosen markets or, for the public sector, what the agency will do to achieve its mission.
- Strategic plans: define how the enterprise will achieve its long-term ambitions. They identify the roadmap of initiatives and the portfolio of investments needed to achieve the goals defined in the strategy.
- Operational plans: deal with the execution of specific projects and changes, as well as any operational tasks not contained in the strategic plan.
How can I help your business
I am an international software professional with 18 years of rich and varied experience in software architecture solutions and technical project management. With a thorough understanding of the organization’s existing processes and inter-departmental structure, I am able to define the process, measure key aspects, analyze data, improve or optimize current processes, and control the future state process.
Specifically, I have the ability to:
- Build the vision of the business organization
- Build the business process methodology framework
- Re-architecting organization ERP application to practice approved processes
- Design, benchmark, analyze and model business processes
- Establish and govern business processes toward performance excellence
- Simulating and optimizing business processes
Do you know one of the key principles of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s philosophy? It is critical to keep reinventing yourself to grow and evolve with a company. I put in place a continuous learning process to change mindsets, goals and processes as they also grow and evolve with the business. By now you know: in today’s ultra-fast and competitive world, if you don’t continue to change and adapt, you may fall behind.
But the continuous learning process is not over. I believe, like Nadella, that we need to move from a “know-it-all” model to a “learn-it-all” model: if you stop learning and growing, you potentially become stagnant, lacking the inventiveness and creativity that are fundamental to bringing value to a company.
Finally, because of my experience in the industry, I know how important it is to focus on consumers and, more importantly, learn from them. The key word is “empathy”. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, stepping into their reality to understand their views, thoughts, feelings, and so on. In this way, by getting to know the consumer’s journey as well as their wants and needs, I can bring real added value to business issues.