Business Process Management (BPM) can be used across industries and across departments to streamline and optimize a multitude of business processes. By modeling your business processes into workflows, it makes it easier to analyse and continually optimize business processes.
There are multiple benefits of BPM, including:
- Process standardization
- Workflow efficiency
- Business agility
- Improved compliance
- Risk limitation
- Collaboration between teams
- System and data integration
- Process and data visibility
- Continuous improvement
- Scalability
Here are twelve BPM examples that show how the practice can be used to optimize operational performance:
BPM standardizes the customer onboarding process so that all customers have a consistent experience. It also ensures that all onboarding meets regulatory compliance requirements and reduces the risk of errors as customer information is submitted into your systems.
The process is made quicker and smoother, shortening the time it takes and reducing paperwork which contributes to a better customer experience. As customers are onboarded more quickly, organizations can then also see faster time-to-value as they will start using your products and services sooner.
Benefits:
- Standardized, compliant process
- Faster experience with less paperwork
- Quicker time-to-value
BPM helps to make the employee onboarding experience more efficient by allowing the HR team to assign tasks to different departments or individuals in the process, such as the finance department to arrange payroll, and the IT team to set up the new employee’s digital profile. These hand-offs and production of paperwork can be automated to make the process even smoother.
BPM can be extended to include training modules and onboarding checklists to guide employees through training sessions as they start their new role. This ensures they all have the necessary skills and are aware of all company protocols as they settle into their new role.
- Integrates all departments
- Automate repetitive tasks
- Ensures employees have all necessary information to begin work
Compliance management is really enhanced by BPM as mapping out the workflows ensures that all steps are always adhered to and provides visibility over the process in one central platform. BPM platforms leave a clearly defined record of activity by capturing every step taken. These can be used as audit trails to prove that business processes have been carried out in-line with rules and regulations.
BPM software also offers you the flexibility and adaptability to quickly modify processes if you need to respond to changes in regulatory requirements.
- Guarantee steps are carried out in line with pre-agreed process
- Built-in audit trails
- Flexibility to adapt to changing requirements
A crucial process for banks, BPM can incorporate business rules to automate decisions for loan approval or rejection, such as meeting credit scores, or matching income and outgoing payments. This helps to speed up the process while maintaining risk management. BPM also enables the automation of routine tasks such as data entry, document verification and credit scoring, making employees more productive and satisfying customers with an efficient process.
BPM also makes the process more efficient by facilitating communication between stakeholders in the process, so loan advisors, managers, underwriters, and customers are all kept updated on the status of the application.
- Speeds up process with automated decisioning
- Ensures compliance and risk management
- Clarity of process between stakeholders
BPM allows efficient assignment and tracking of tasks in the vendor management process, such as performance evaluations, risk assessment and contract renewals. This helps to ensure that responsibilities are clearly defined, and deadlines are met. This includes a comprehensive view of the vendor relationship lifecycle, such as contract terms, any past problems and how they were addressed, which can help you to make strategic decisions about your vendor accounts.
BPM platforms incorporate document management, so all related documents can be effectively stored in a centralized location and linked to the associated steps. So important documentation such as contracts and performance records are easy to find.
- Visibility to guarantee work is completed on time
- Maintain vendor relationships with tracking
- Centralized document storage for consolidated knowledge
BPM can significantly improve the approvals process by allowing you to set business rules that automatically grant, reject or escalate approvals based on predefined criteria. This means the straightforward cases don’t need the attention of your employees, and they can focus on cases that need their due diligence. Additionally, if there’s a case that requires immediate attention, BPM platforms provide mobile access so approvers can review requests no matter where they are!
BPM platforms also provide real-time monitoring as you can see what point the process is at. This helps to identify any bottlenecks, so you can make improvements to speed up cycle times.
- Conditional approvals to enhance team productivity
- Real-time monitoring to eliminate bottlenecks
- Mobile approvals for work on-the-go
A vital function for any manufacturer, BPM can streamline the product lifecycle management process by mapping and integrating processes from supplier and vendor onboarding, through to production and manufacturing, distribution and logistics, and even end-of-life management. This gives a 360-degree view of all elements of the lifecycle. BPM platforms integrate disparate supply chain systems, giving you a single view of data and making it easy to share information with vendors and customers. This helps to make sure goods are delivered on time and avoid delays in production and delivery.
BPM can facilitate quality assurance by defining steps in the process for testing, validation and quality control and ensure that products meet these standards before progressing to the next step. Should any alterations to products, suppliers or customer need to be made, BPM can also ensure efficient change management. It’s easy to amend processes through a BPM platform and then ensure that all relevant stakeholders are informed about modifications.
- Connect various stakeholders and processes for 360 visibility
- Integration with data sources across supply chain
- Quality assurance and change management
BPM can significantly improve logistics management by creating automated workflows for the order processing and fulfilment process, such as automated order validation and inventory checks to minimize errors and speed up the processing time. In the warehouse, workflows can be created for tasks such as picking, packing and shipping with notifications sent between systems and users to reduce errors and delays.
BPM also aids customs compliance by centralizing information on one platform with automatic updates to keep the process moving and real-time tracking to help avoid penalties and delays.
- Improve accuracy and reduce time of order fulfilment tasks
- Improve efficiency of warehouse operations
- Centralized data and automated steps to ensure customs compliance
BPM procurement solutions help to provide an integrated, efficient solution by using a platform to connect the process end-to-end, with all vendors and their associated documents recorded in one place. This optimizes contract and vendor relationship management, with automated alerts helping to manage contract milestone and shorten acquisition times. Additionally, it helps bid evaluation and vendor selection by incorporating decision-making workflows to ensure that the most suitable vendors are chosen.
BPM workflows help to ensure compliance with company procurement policies, regulatory requirement and contact terms by creating standardized workflows and automating key steps to reduce the risk of non-compliance.
- End-to-end management through a single platform for contract and vendor relationship management
- Shorter acquisition cycle times
- Ensure compliance
BPM enables proactive quality assurance with quality checks within workflows to ensure that predefined criteria is met at each stage of the process before it can progress. This helps to detect issues and prevent them from developing any further. Should any issues arise, BPM can also help with root cause analysis by providing visibility into the process data so you can see where the issue arose and correct it to stop it from happening again.
Continuous monitoring and reporting in BPM also help teams to assess performance and identify trends in data to make informed decisions about how to make improvements to processes, products and services.
- Quality checks to prevent issues
- Visibility into processes for root cause analysis
- Performance monitoring to enable improvement
A vital business process for insurers, BPM can standardize the claims process to ensure that each claim follows a consistent workflow: from the claim being raised through to the resolution and payout. A BPM platform facilitates integration between disparate internal systems so that all data and information is available in a central repository, as well as integrating with external systems, be it financial databases for monetary claims, or healthcare databases for medical claims, to validate information submitted by claimants.
You can also automate rules within the workflow to assess the validity of claims according to your predefined criteria. This allows employees to focus on valid claims and ensures consistency and accuracy when processing information that comes through.
- Workflow standardization for consistency
- System integration for data visibility
- Automatic rejection and adjudication
BPM can significantly enhance the order management process by automating workflows to decrease manual intervention and enabling the handoff of work and data between systems and people. This ultimately accelerates the fulfilment cycle. The logical BPM workflows also provide real-time visibility into order statuses to monitor progress and provide updates to customers, which improves customer satisfaction. This tracking can also help to identify potential bottlenecks and help improve the process along the way.
BPM also provides the scalability so that as your business grows, you can scale the order management process accordingly and adapt processes to accommodate operating at a higher volume without sacrificing efficiency.
- Accelerate fulfilment cycle with automated order processing
- Visibility for status tracking to keep customers updated
- Potential to scale and grow
The Bizagi platform allows you to model, design automate and manage your business processes on a single low-code platform.
You can try Bizagi Modeler for free to map out your workflows and prepare for operational efficiency. Our platform is helping companies around the world to evaluate, improve and automate business processes, all on one enterprise platform.
