The Complete Guide to Business Process Management

Business process management (BPM) optimizes the typical business’s operations and contributes to achieving its strategic goals. Businesses with unorganized processes and inefficient workflows may face errors and be inefficient in their ability to grow and achieve business goals.

Business Process Management is an essential strategy for businesses looking to improve their performance and maintain long-term success. In addition, the industry report states that the size of the global market for BPM was estimated at USD 14.46 billion in 2022 and is projected to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.9% between 2023 and 2030. This growth is evidence of growing recognition that BPM must keep up with changing consumer demands and technology developments.

This comprehensive guide on business process management will provide the knowledge, strategies, and best practices needed to fully utilize BPM to boost operational excellence and strategically accomplish organizational goals.

Meaning of Business Process Management (BPM)

Business process management (BPM) is an approach that employs various techniques to identify, model, analyze, monitor, improve, and optimize existing business processes. BPM methodology is often helpful for predictable and repeated tasks or processes usually done in a company.

BPM helps you evaluate your existing process and analyze the improvements that can be made to achieve the maximum business outcomes. You can optimize the processes to reduce cost, improve efficiency, and assist with initiatives for digital transformation.

Types of BPM

Based on the application in different organizational sectors, BPM can be divided into three categories:

Integration-centric BPM

This BPM involves processes with low human intervention requirements. These processes rely more on APIs and other systems that combine data from several systems.

Examples: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Human Resource Management (HRM)

Human-centric BPM

This type of BPM, in contrast to integration-centric BPM, is centered on human interaction, usually when permissions are required. Teams may allocate tasks to different responsibilities with intuitive drag-and-drop user interfaces, which makes it easier to hold people accountable throughout the process.

Examples: Hiring and onboarding, Interviewing and creative works like designing

Document-centric BPM

This kind of BPM is based on a particular document, like a contract. When they buy a good or service, businesses must go through several approval processes and forms to establish a contract between the seller and the customer.

Examples: Document review and approval and email approvals

Business Process Management Lifecycle

BPM lifecycle has five critical stages and it is crucial to execute all these stages to move your business to the next level.

1. Design

Design is the starting phase of your BPM process, which focuses on finding the scope and boundaries of the future state processes.

Basically, this stage is performed to:

• Identifying which processes needed to be optimized
• Establishing requirements and goals
• Identifying the stakeholders who will work on the process
• Defining each person’s tasks and roles

2. Modelling

The second stage involves generating a visual representation of the entire process. This representation is a template for the process, providing a shared knowledge of its operation.

Here are some actions you may consider taking:

• Process flow definition
• Recognizing the inputs and results
• Describing the tasks and activities

3. Execution

In this stage, the process is implemented based on the model that you established in the modelling stage. It mainly includes:

• Assigning work to relevant stakeholders.
• Providing them with the resources they require.
• Observing their progress.

The execution stage makes sure that the process is followed correctly and effectively. It also implies that everyone involved is on the same page and understands how to manage the workload.

4. Monitoring

Monitoring is to be performed to find problems or areas that require improvement to track performance. Key performance indicators (KPIs), such as cycle time, throughput, or error rate, can be measured. This gives you valuable feedback that you may use later to streamline the process and increase its effectiveness.

5. Optimise

The last step in the BPM lifecycle is ‘Optimize’.  In this phase, you will modify your process and eliminate bottlenecks based on the insights you gained during the monitoring phase to make it more efficient.

A well-designed monitoring system may drive operations toward optimization and process improvement.

Process optimization may reduce labor waste, increase output quality, guarantee process compliance, and expedite execution times.

Benefits of Business Process Management

According to the leading BPM research authority, Gartner, BPM’s importance arises from its ability to coordinate individuals, systems, and data to accomplish specific business objectives. Apart from enhancing the team and organizational performance, BPM has several other benefits, discussed below:

1. Streamlined workflows and greater efficiency

BPM enables enterprises to optimize workflows by automating manual tasks like data administration, data flows, data entry, approval procedures, and report production. Automated workflows, standardized processes, and process monitoring improve the quality and quantity of worker output.

2. Strategically aligned tighter process controls

When business processes are left to the desires of various managers, they often expand organically and randomly. BPM employs a systematic approach to comprehend the starting point of every process and how it can be optimized to fulfil the same objectives with fewer stages, less information, and less manual labor.

3. Improved business agility and scalability

Agile businesses are becoming increasingly advantageous over slower-moving older companies. BPM opens new architectural paths for AI capabilities, cloud services, market prospects, and regulatory changes.

4. Better customer service and experiences

BPM contributes to customer service and experience and may help businesses analyze the existing processes. Essential BPM practices that help in achieving excellent customer satisfaction are:

• Analyzing existing processes to find instances where customer service representatives waste time entering redundant data into a system.
• Identifying unnecessary data and automatically collecting, organizing, and compiling the necessary customer data from several sources.
• Get approaches to help customers understand how far they are in a complicated procedure and what extra steps are required.

5. Connected silos and more targeted communication

BPM software can facilitate the connection of isolated systems and processes by streamlining technical tasks and enhancing communication. According to independent SAP technical function consultant Valentina Botnari, BPM’s real-time visualization capabilities provide connections between people, processes, information systems, software, SaaS platforms, and machines.

BPM may automate business process automation IT integration by converting graphical models into executable commands.

6. Reduced risk, waste, redundancy, and money traps

Business managers and teams can use BPM to evaluate their present state and identify opportunities to streamline and optimize their business processes. The goal is to remove waste, redundancy, error-prone batches, compliance issues, and unprofitable automation implementations.

BPM Examples and Application

Business process management software offers processes greater structure and eliminates inefficiencies in a particular workflow. Here are a few business process management examples of successful applications:

Customer onboarding

Here’s how to integrate the BPM lifecycle into the customer onboarding process to optimize workflows. Here is an example:

Example: A bank wants to streamline the onboarding of new customers to boost productivity, reduce mistakes, and enhance the general customer experience.

Read more about Digital Customer Onboarding in Banks

You can start by mapping all the onboarding processes, including account application, identification verification, and account creation.  You must analyze the methods that BPM technologies can help you automate.

The BPM approach in this scenario: An online account can be integrated with the bank CRM. So that it can start the identification verification process and collect consumer data from CRM, customer documents can be digitally stored and accessed using a centralized business process management system, which also reduces paperwork.

Compliance Management

You can standardize compliance-related procedures throughout your organization to guarantee compliance with internal policies and industry laws. Using process automation tools, you may automate data validation, approval procedures, compliance checks, and mapping out compliance operations. Look at the example given below:

Example: A pharmaceutical company producing and selling pharmaceuticals and medicines needs to comply with government and healthcare rules.

When new rules are released, the BPM software evaluates a company’s compliance procedures. It generates workflows for necessary changes, distributes notifications for overdue tasks, keeps an audit trail, assigns tasks to relevant departments, and compiles findings into a report.

Product lifecycle management

Business process management allows you to carefully manage everything from product conception to design, development, and distribution.

Example:  A software company is creating new CRM software for small and medium-sized businesses.

Incorporate business process management (BPM) to optimize the collection and handling of essential data, including product specifications and user requirements. This makes it simple for developers and product managers to obtain vital information while developing new products.

Project management

BPM may be utilized to streamline project processes from beginning to end.

Example: If a marketing agency has incorporated BPM to improve project management, BPM can assist in numerous ways: automating work assignments, managing data with relevant documentation, allocating resources efficiently, and standardizing campaign planning and customer communication. Additionally, it can provide stakeholders with an in-depth review of ongoing campaign launch activities.

Different types of BPM technologies

Business process management software (BPMS), often known as BPM systems or suites, is a grouping of many technologies:

• Process mining technology: Enables the discovery, modelling, and analysis of the tasks that drive business processes.
• BPMN (Business Process Management Notation) tools: Used to diagram business processes.
• Workflow engines assist workflow management and automate the flow of tasks necessary to accomplish a business process.
• Business rules engines (BREs) that allow end users to alter business rules without the need to consult a coder.

Future of Business Process Management

BPM is a developing field pushed by the dynamic nature of work and business today. BPM and its supporting technologies have evolved to suit these new requirements. A quick summary of current and developing BPM trends is provided below:

• Citizen developer tools are democratizing BPM by allowing more users across the organization to identify, implement, and measure innovative ways to improve processes.
• Intelligent business process automation is increasing process efficiency by integrating AI, machine learning, and RPA into workflows.
• Organizations may now more easily create a complete overview of the activities that characterize a process and how to optimize it by using automated process mining technologies.
• Process automation is expected to become much more flexible when implementing adaptive process management or the capacity to undertake iterative process modelling in real time.
• Companies can now pose “what-if” questions to make improvements and gain a deeper understanding of their current processes due to advancements in process modelling.
• Businesses can experiment and test modifications to business processes using process simulation before going into production.

How Newgen helps in the implementation of BPMS

BPM facilitates the establishment and coordination of business-level processes. It entails examining and enhancing all your organization’s business processes. Understanding business process management (BPM) is an operational benefit and a requirement in today’s competitive business environment. To stay ahead of your competitors, choose Newgen’s low-code process automation platform to manage your business processes.

Use the most feature-rich business process automation software to automate for desirable results. Harness the power of workflow automation together with content services, business rules, omnichannel communication, case management, RPA, and AI to create intelligent, efficient, and context-aware processes.

Newgen helps you to exceed automation and create an agile, constantly improving organization with thousands of procedures. Modernize work using a business process management system from Newgen to enable automated and touchless self-service.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. What is a BPM tool?

Business process management (BPM) tools are software applications that facilitate BPM as an end-to-end discipline of business process improvement. These tools help businesses improve efficiency, align operations to strategic goals, and reduce errors, such as Newgen.

Q2. What are the 5 steps of BPM?

Businesses use business process management (BPM) as an organized approach to designing, modelling, implementing, monitoring, and optimizing everyday business operations. These steps offer a comprehensive and structured method for enhancing and optimizing business processes.

Q3. What are the four components of process management?

Many individuals study or practice four basic components of process management: organizing, directing, controlling, and planning. Some go beyond these four fundamental, generic aspects to incorporate communication, resource allocation, and human resource-related initiatives.