If you’re like most business owners, you’re spending a lot of time handling repetitive and ongoing processes that keep your business running. Streamlining your business processes is the key to growth! Complex and unorganized business processes can mean hours of wasted time every day. By making your business more efficient, you’ll be able to save money, free up time, and discover new opportunities to impress your customers. In this article from Vermillion, we’ll explore what business process management (BPM) is, how it can benefit your company, and some tips to help you start making improvements.

What is Business Process Management?

BPM is an approach to improving the processes businesses use to handle everyday business activities. Even more than this, BPM involves analyzing, optimizing, and continuously improving business processes. The aim is to build better processes that enable your business to do more in less time and generate better results. KissFlow explains that BPM accomplishes these goals by simplifying the way people work, continuously refining routine tasks, and leveraging tech solutions.

Why Should You Care About Business Process Management?

Regardless of the size of your business, BPM can offer several important benefits for your company. First and foremost, BPM will improve the efficiency of your everyday operations so you can spend more time on big-picture projects. By streamlining routine processes, you’ll also save money on labor. Using technology to automate some of your business processes can further help you avoid common human errors.

BPM isn’t just valuable for your business back-end processes, but for the customer-facing side of your business as well. Standardizing and digitizing your customer-based processes will help you deliver a more consistent customer experience across the board. For example, using customer relationship management (CRM) software and establishing standard customer support workflows will enable everyone on your team to provide prompt and frustration-free support to customers.

Look for signs that it’s time to update your business processes. For example, if normal daily tasks take longer than they should or your current system feels bulky and complex, it’s time for a change. Ready to improve your business processes? In the sections below, you’ll learn how to effectively implement business process management at your company.

Evaluate Your Existing Processes

Get started with BPM by taking a good look at your existing processes. Ask yourself what’s working and what’s not. Better yet, ask your employees about their pain points and find out what obstacles they’re facing as they navigate their daily workload. Look for inefficiencies that could be improved.

You can also use process mining to gather data about your existing business processes. Process mining involves using data to identify business processes and workflows that can benefit from automation. This is often called task mining. Not only will process mining help improve productivity, but it can also help you discover hidden opportunities to take your business in new directions. Get started with process mining by identifying potential data sources that relate to your business goals.

Establish New Goals

Speaking of goals, what do you want to achieve with your BPM improvements? It’s important to consider your goals before making adjustments to your business processes. Without clear, measurable goals, you won’t be able to tell whether or not your improvements made a difference. Are you trying to reduce the amount of time it takes to onboard a new client? Save money on bookkeeping? Maintain consistency in your customer support approach? Determine what it is you want to accomplish before moving forward.

Communicate with Your Team

When it comes to BPM, communication is key. The Association of Business Process Management Professionals International explains that you will face resistance unless your workforce is on board with the changes you have in mind. Make sure everyone understands the goals you’re trying to achieve.

Find out how your changes will affect the day-to-day workflow of your employees. While implementing new software may streamline a certain business task, it can disrupt your employees’ productivity while they learn their way around the new tool. When no one plans for this disruption, it can be frustrating for your staff. Open communication will ensure everyone is on the same page as you make changes to existing rules, procedures, methods, and strategies.

Incorporate New Tech Tools

Often, BPM involves automating business tasks by leveraging software and online tools. For example, if you manage a remote team of freelancers, you can use a variety of collaboration and communication apps to handle project management from anywhere. Look for apps that can help you automate other time-consuming business processes, like lead generation, customer support, order fulfillment, invoice processing, social media management, and expense tracking.

Keep in mind that BPM isn’t about replacing your employees with apps and machines. Rather, it involves improving the work of your employees and freeing up their talents for projects that require a human touch.

Evaluate Your Progress

As you implement BPM improvements at your business, be sure to track your results. Measure your progress towards your goals so you can find what’s working and what isn’t. Importantly, be prepared to pivot your strategies if they’re not producing the outcome you need. BPM is not something you do once and then move on. It involves continuous monitoring and adjusting. Take advantage of analytics tools to measure the effectiveness of your new business processes and track your progress towards your goals. With the right software programs, you should be able to track process metrics like productivity, turnaround time, error rate, cost-effectiveness, profitability, and ROI.

If you feel like you’ve reached a plateau with your business and you’re not sure which steps to take to encourage growth, BPM might be your answer. Streamlining your business processes will make room in your schedule and budget for growth-focused projects. Start evaluating your existing processes today so you can take your business to the next level!

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