As organisations build their operations around digital technologies, they need to ensure business process management (BPM) functionality does not end up slipping into the background.
So says Megan Potrzeba, marketing and content strategist at Appian, a US-based provider of low-code and BPM software solutions. She warns that companies that neglect BPM can end up in a situation where chaotic processes undermine the benefits of the underlying technologies being deployed.
"Businesses that want to embrace digital transformation need process excellence to spur value creation. BPM tools can make process improvement easy, laying the groundwork for long-term efficiency and sustainable innovation," she adds.
According to Potrzeba, the BPM world is changing, with process management capabilities frequently attached to workflow and low-code development platforms. This has resulted in businesses being able to more easily refine their processes.
At the same time, businesses are facing mounting pressure to coordinate data, people, and content across complex workflows. This makes process management essential, and underlines the importance of BPM solutions in today's enterprise environment.
However, many businesses continue to create processes in isolation from one another, or even neglect formal process creation altogether. This, Potrzeba says, can result in the organisation running into "significant efficiency and agility roadblocks".
She explains that organisations can use BPM tools to simplify and streamline process management in its entirety with dedicated BPM technologies laying the groundwork for sustainable operational success by:
- Automating repeatable processes: Many organisations have tasks that are handled the same way every time they happen, with the specifics of the activity depending on specific data parameters surrounding the incident. BPM can be used to automate all or part of those processes.
- Coordinating processes across teams: Businesses often rely on specialised, siloed technology solutions for various business units, resulting in users in the different units having to use email or similar tools to pass tasks between themselves. These limited process coordination capabilities can prevent organizations from streamlining operations across the business, allow key tasks to slip through the cracks and limit visibility into processes. BPM tools formalise processes throughout the organisation and serve as a hub for inter-departmental communication, reporting and task tracking.
- Adapting as the business changes: Change is seldom easy for any organisation, but companies often fall into a trap of thinking that a new technology or a new leader will inherently change the business. Change can only really happen when the underlying processes have been adjusted to reflect new goals and priorities. BPM platforms provide visibility into processes, and therefore can enable required adjustments to be made quickly and easily.
- Aligning technology and processes: Adjusting processes around emerging technologies is critical in the era of digital transformation, and BPM solutions make it possible.
"Organisations can implement state-of-the-art technologies. They can bring in the best leaders in the industry. They can even go all-in on new recruiting pushes to bring in talent. All these conventional strategies fall apart when companies don't have their processes in order. This is where BPM technologies come into play," Potrzeba concludes.
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