The term business process management (in short: BPM) refers to a method for discovering, modelling, analysing, optimising and automating business processes. Now here’s something to boost your heart rate: All studies show: process management contributes to the achievement of strategic goals. But what exactly is business process management? What does it all entail? And how does a digital workspace boost your business process management?
What is process management?
Process management is a methodology for aligning business processes with strategic goals through the end-to-end discovery, modelling, analysis, optimisation and automation of these processes. Think of it as a long-term strategy that continuously monitors processes with the aim of achieving optimal efficiency and effectiveness.
As an aside, we should not confuse the concepts of Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Process Management Suite (BPMS). The abbreviation BPM refers to a methodology mainly applied by people, where BPMS predominantly concerns the applications used to support BPM projects (for example, by enabling IT and business professionals to collaborate better within the entire process management chain).
Process management is particularly useful for repetitive and/or continuous tasks, such as purchasing, expense approval, accounts receivable, invoicing, processing orders and onboarding new employees. To get the most out of this management method, it is important to establish the right process measurement tools and train your managers in effective process management.
The importance of process management
Organisations are dealing with more digital processes within a large variety of applications and systems. A growing number of companies is in the process of a digital transformation, in order to become a truly digital company. Once an organisation sets of on a digital transformation journey, this also expands its potential for process management. After all, the more processes are digitised and systems are connected, the easier it becomes to automate various processes and tasks linked to these very systems.
Process management opens the door to numerous benefits. Organisations that continuously automate and optimise their processes can increase their productivity and efficiency, reduce operational costs and errors, optimise their customer experience framework and offer better products and services to their customers. In addition, process management allows them to maximise their digital transformation wins.
And there is another advantage. Digital organisations focus more on projects and outcomes, instead of departments. Streamlined processes often play an important part in safeguarding an organisation’s structure.
