
The Main Difference between BPM and RPA
Business process management is critical to ensuring your business processes deliver the results you need. Learn about the key concepts and components of BPM.
After reading this article you should have a good understanding of the following points:
Before you begin a business process management (BPM) initiative, it’s critical to know where you’re going. That’s why the first step in implementing an effective BPM strategy is to review your business objectives. This will help prevent misguided priorities and focus your efforts on the processes that will best support your goals.
To create a clear picture of your company’s business objectives, gather all the key stakeholders together to talk through where you’d like to be in the next few years—and what steps need to happen to get there. It can also help to conduct an audit across every department in your organisation, which will give you a strong baseline understanding of how each department operates.
Once you’ve defined these objectives, identify which processes will have the biggest impact on reaching them. You may discover that what worked for one area of your organisation doesn’t work for another—so use this time for research and data collection before setting anything in stone.
Imagine the business process management journey as a hike up to a mountain peak. What you’ll need for that trek is a map, and this high-level plan will help you identify which processes are most important to your organisation.
The first step is to start with the processes that provide the most value for your company; in other words, those that directly impact your customer or client. Your goal here is not to look at every single process within your organisation—that would be overwhelming—but rather, to focus on mapping out the most relevant and important processes. In addition, try to identify what role they play in reaching key goals within your organisation.
A thorough process analysis—which can be conducted by either team members or an external consultant—is necessary to understand the current state of your processes. Your analysis should include a map of both manual and automated tasks, timelines for each task, the tools that are used throughout the process, and how well these tools meet the needs of employees. A gap analysis may be useful at this stage to determine where changes need to be made.
At Agility System in order to identify the specific business processes within a company our experienced business analysts perform a gap analysis exercise known as a Discovery Exercise which is our proven methodology to provide an overall scope of deliverables in addition to revealing the following:
To improve employee-driven effectiveness and consistency, it’s important to determine how you want to measure your progress. This step may be straightforward if you’re trying to drive change within a small team or department, but if the process management initiative is company-wide, consider starting with a few key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you define your metrics and benchmarks.
This can be as simple as using a balanced scorecard approach—determining what success looks like for your organisation, then using metrics and KPIs to show progress towards reaching those goals. Seeing specific ways in which this initiative has helped the company can also help identify areas for improvement. Plus it enables you to show stakeholders the value of this business process management project—and justify its costs.
In your organisation, this person should be someone with a strong knowledge of the business and its processes. They should also be a good communicator, and be able to get along with everyone who will be involved in implementing the new solution. They’ll need to have the ability to organise and plan ahead, as well as making decisions and taking charge.
If you’re going to be successful in implementing a business process management system, you’ll need to enlist the support and commitment of senior company executives. This means that everyone needs to buy into the initiative and understand exactly what their role is in that initiative.
You will need your senior managers and leaders from different areas of the organisation to explain how they see their own responsibilities changing, what actions are needed, and how they want to move forward.
By following this guideline, you can ensure that all stakeholders are involved in your business process management program while keeping it clear who is accountable for each action and item along the way.
It’s important to keep management informed of progress, especially if things are not going well. If you have a major issue or problem in the process, it is important that leadership be made aware. They may be able to help. Once you have a solution or a plan, they may provide valuable feedback and input on the situation.
Phased implementation allows you to take on one part at a time, which can ease the burden of managing such a big project and allow for easier collaboration. Perhaps you want to start with your internal processes first, since you know those best, and then move on to working out the kinks in your supply chain once you have a process management strategy in place that works for your company.
Keep in mind that phased implementation could get drawn out if the scope of each phase is too large or if it continues indefinitely without any clear goals or direction. Keeping stakeholders engaged during this time can be challenging as well. Stakeholders will likely lose interest if they don’t see progress being made so it’s important to communicate with them regularly and keep them updated.
If you’re looking to implement a business process in your company, understand that it’s going to take time. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. You want to dictate the pace so you can make sure the project moves smoothly and efficiently from start to finish without any unexpected bumps along the way.
To ensure your BPM implementation works, follow these steps:
With extensive experience of Quality Management, Risk & Compliance in the Energy, Nuclear & Defence industries since 1979, Peter formed BusinessPort in 1996 to specialise in Process-based Management Systems delivering both Performance and Compliance.
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Business process management is critical to ensuring your business processes deliver the results you need. Learn about the key concepts and components of BPM.
Business process management is critical to ensuring your business processes deliver the results you need. Learn about the key concepts and components of BPM.
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