The concise guide to what Business Processes are
A business process is a collection of structured activities or relevant tasks that produce a specific service or product or serves a particular goal for a customer (or a customer segment).
It may often be visualized as a flowchart of a sequence of activities with interleaving decision points or as a Process Matrix of activities with relevance rules based on data in the process.
What can identifying, documenting and automating Business Processes do for your organization?
1. Simplification
As a first step, documenting Business Processes can help you turn flipcharts and stickies on your wall into process models. Once you have the process models, as a second step the process models can be analyzed through simulation to quantify projected performance improvements for your organization.
2. Efficiency
Process models describe a sequence of business activities. Some may be performed by people, others maybe by automated systems – linked by rules. BPM software can help you automate the business processes, enforce rules and track completion against assigned deadlines. This will dramatically increase efficiency in the organization, enable you to find the bottlenecks, and improve the cycle time.
3. Control, Regulations, and Compliance
The consistency of Business Processes across your organization is important in this competitive world. Moreover, the regulatory burdens and governmental policies require your employees to follow certain guidelines, failing to which will cost thousands or in certain cases millions in fines. By taking control of the business processes, a BPM software can help to ensure compliance with policies while allowing local variations wherever they make sense.
4. Growth
Having the documented processes and systems in place enables you to maintain the consistency and to be agile in terms of adding more customers or expanding your business to new markets.
5. Continuous Improvement
Dashboards and reports enable you to monitor the performance of your automated business processes and allow you to define key metrics and performance targets. The ultimate goal of Business Process Management is the optimization of business performance. Once you have the data, another possibility of improving your business will be to leverage on big data analytics and real-time alerts when results begin to deviate from performance targets.
In addition, BPM software can enable you to have rule-triggered automated escalation and remediation procedures, providing the zero-latency response to the business environment.
Business Process Modeling and Automation
There is a variety of BPM software that is useful for companies of different sizes. While documenting the business process, itself is a significant advantage over other companies, automating and monitoring them will enable businesses to continuously improve their processes and run their organization in a cost-effective way.