When Should Your Organization Implement Business Process Management?

Business process management helps organizations build solid frameworks for all their processes. With all the processes mapped, monitored, and optimized, the probability of error greatly decreases, and the process efficiency increases. But does your organization need to implement business process management? If so, when?

Here are some instances that indicate your organization needs an agile and dynamic business process management system. 

1. Dynamic processes that require regulatory compliance changes

Business process compliance refers to making sure that the business processes are in accordance with the relevant industry guidelines. Ensuring compliance can be daunting for growing organizations, as when requirements evolve, the organization should either comply quickly or undergo penalties. The risk of not complying is greater when it comes to law-related policy changes such as a change in customer information management following a change in finance or privacy laws. If you are struggling to manage processes that often undergo compliance changes or have high-risk compliance regulations, your organization needs a business process management solution. 

2. Recurring processes that are too laborious to do manually 

Having a lot of common and recurring processes is the primary reason to implement business process management. Companies have seen a commendable boost in the balance sheet by simply replacing their overly laborious and error-prone manual processes with fully automated workflows. Manual process management is highly inefficient. Whatever you manage to save by not moving to an automated model will quickly evaporate through process inconsistencies and data inaccuracy issues. BPM software allows you to implement end-to-end business process automation for heightened efficiency and process improvement.

3. Complex business processes that require orchestration and coordination across departments

Business processes are most often not unidirectional. They require coordination across multiple departments, business units, and divisions. Organizations with tightly siloed processes will suffer the white space between departments where work gets delayed or lost. While a cross-departmental process like employee onboarding is less risky, processes like expense reporting and billing are high-risk failures. BPM tools help you orchestrate and optimize the processes seamlessly across departments by centralizing the process knowledge and data. 

4. Mission-critical processes that directly impact the smooth functioning of the organization

The mission-critical processes or core processes of an organization are the most data- and people-intensive. All processes that directly impact the customers or expose the operations to risk are considered critical. Business process management demonstrates great accuracy in orchestrating and optimizing these high-level processes. The BPM system could automatically alert you when a vendor violates a legal policy or when an unauthorized user tries to access confidential customer information.

5. Business processes that require legacy applications for their completion

Applications that are outdated and obsolete but are critical to business operations are called legacy applications. Companies find it challenging to replace or customize these applications to work with modern tools and technologies. Business process management is the best way to enhance the capabilities of your legacy applications. You can implement BPM solutions on top of the older applications to become a centralized system that holds all the data together. Maintain the application dependencies seamlessly and help non-legacy users work comfortably with the legacy applications.

6. Business processes with exceptions that are handled manually and require quick turnarounds

Exceptions are common in business processes, and every business should have a solution to support exception handling. There are technical exceptions and functional exceptions. Technical exceptions refer to system outages, data inaccuracies, unstructured inputs, and execution errors while functional exceptions refer to use cases that are either unique or return false to default behavior. Your organization can’t afford to have the operations halted every time such exceptions occur. Business process management helps you handle complex variations of exceptions without hassle.

BPM is a business necessity 

The answer is yes, your organization does need business process management, preferably from the get-go. When processes develop, they should be monitored and documented for an effective learning curve. When processes mature, they should be centralized and coordinated for effective management. Sooner or later, you will realize business process management to be a necessity to ensure the smooth sailing of business operations.