Role of Business Process Management in digital transformation: Successful strategies

Did you know that worldwide investments in digital transformation are forecasted to grow to $3.4 trillion by 2026?

Digital transformation has emerged as an indispensable requirement for companies to endure and maintain competitiveness in today’s market. The rapid advancement of technology has brought about a significant shift in customer behavior, market trends, and competitors’ strategies. Hence, it is time businesses transform digitally to keep pace with these changes and remain ahead in the business game.

At the process level, digital transformation enables businesses to automate and streamline their operations, enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and improve customer experience. By deploying digital solutions and technologies, companies can automate routine tasks, optimize processes, and leverage data analytics to gain necessary insights into business demands. This empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, enhance customer engagement, and improve operational efficiency, achieving a competitive edge.

This is where the combined role of digital transformation and business process management (BPM) comes into play. Business process management involves analyzing and improving business processes to increase efficiency, while business process transformation is the complete overhaul of existing processes to meet the demands of changing markets. Thus, digitization plays a significant role in business process management and all-inclusive transformation, enabling businesses to automate their processes and respond proactively to market changes.

What are the different categories of business process management?

Process modeling: It involves creating a visual representation of a process, usually with the help of diagrams, to understand how it works and identify areas for improvement.

Process analysis: This process uses data and metrics to analyze performance and identify improvement areas.

Process redesign: This step reengineers a process to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and improve quality.

Process automation: This part is extremely important as it uses technology to automate repetitive tasks and streamline processes.

Process monitoring: This stage tracks key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics to ensure a process performs optimally.

Process optimization: Finally, this step continuously improves the process to achieve better results, often through data analytics and other technologies.

Benefits of business process management

Improved efficiency: BPM helps organizations streamline processes by eliminating inefficiencies, reducing redundant tasks, and optimizing workflows, which results in quicker processing times, diminished costs, and improved customer satisfaction

Better agility: BPM enables organizations to respond quickly to changing market conditions by making modifying and adapting processes easier, helping organizations stay competitive and agile in an ever-changing business environment.

Increased visibility: BPM provides organizations greater visibility into their processes by tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics. This allows firms to detect domains for improvement so that they make data-driven decisions easily.

Greater collaboration: BPM facilitates cooperation and communication between different departments and stakeholders involved in a process, thus n improving teamwork, reducing silos, and enhancing overall organizational performance.

Enhanced compliance: BPM enables organizations to ensure compliance with regulations and standards by enforcing rules and policies that cut down the risk of associated penalties and non-compliance.

Challenges of business process management

Implementation of business process management can pose various challenges for organizations ranging from technical issues, such as integration with legacy systems and software compatibility problems, to cultural challenges, such as resistance to change and lack of employee buy-in.

Organizations must adopt a systematic and holistic approach to BPM implementation to overcome these challenges involving process mapping, continuous improvement, and effective change management. Addressing these challenges can enable organizations to achieve the benefits of BPM, including improved efficiency, visibility, agility, compliance, and collaboration. In addition, by identifying and addressing these concerns and challenges, organizations can implement BPM successfully and achieve their strategic goals while remaining competitive in a rapidly evolving business landscape.

Why should leaders prioritize business process management today?

Leaders should prioritize Business Process Management (BPM) today as it can provide numerous benefits for organizations’ success in today’s ever-changing business environment. One of the primary reasons is that BPM can increase efficiency, reduce costs, and boost productivity by streamlining processes. In addition, BPM can also improve agility by enabling organizations to modify and improve their operations in response to changing market conditions.

Additionally, BPM can help organizations improve their customer experience by identifying areas for improvement in their processes, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty. Furthermore, BPM can assist organizations in achieving compliance with the growing complexity of regulations and standards, avoiding legal and reputational risks. Finally, BPM can foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, allowing organizations to identify new opportunities for growth and competitive advantage.

Leaders should prioritize BPM today because it can help organizations achieve their strategic goals, improve their bottom line, and stay competitive in a rapidly evolving business landscape. By executing BPM, organizations can increase their efficiency, enhance agility, improve their customer experience, achieve compliance, and enable innovation, all of which can drive growth and success in today’s dynamic business environment.

Expected features of an ideal BPM tool

Here are the key elements of a perfect BPM tool in bullet points:

Best practices and strategies for BPM

Identify the key processes to digitize: Organizations should find out and prioritize their primary business processes to be digitized to streamline and automate repetitive tasks, thus reducing errors and improving efficiency.

Develop a process-centric mindset throughout the organization: Companies should develop a process-centric attitude by warranting that all employees understand the importance of processes and how they contribute to the organization’s success. This helps to create a culture of continuous improvement and process optimization.

Establish a process governance framework: Organizations should establish a process governance framework to ensure that processes are standardized, well-documented, and compliant with relevant regulations, reducing variability and improving process quality.

Ensure process ownership and accountability: Process ownership and responsibility should be established at all levels of the organization to ensure that processes are continuously improved and optimized to create a culture of process excellence and foster innovation.

Implement process automation: Organizations should leverage solutions to modernize process workflows, erase manual tasks, and diminish errors to free up time for employees to focus on higher-value pursuits and improve overall efficacy.

Continuously monitor and optimize processes: Enterprises should constantly optimize their business operations using data analytics and performance metrics to detect areas for improvement and drive continuous process advancement.

The future of business process management

The future of business process management in businesses is promising due to the skyrocketing adoption of digital technologies. Consequently, BPM is likely to grow in importance with the companies seeking to enhance their processes and automate their operations. Hence, companies can drive innovation, enhance customer experience, and achieve sustainable growth in an ever-evolving business landscape by adopting a process-centric mindset and embracing automation technologies.

Furthermore, several trends are shaping the future of BPM, including embracing AI and ML, cloud-based BPM solutions, a focus on customer experience, automation of end-to-end processes, and fusion with other technologies like RPA and blockchain. As a result, businesses can optimize their processes, reduce costs, and improve their overall performance by leveraging BPM tools and strategies.

Try business process automation with AssistEdge

AssistEdge, an end-to-end Business Process Automation (BPA) platform, can help organizations streamline operations, increase efficiency, and improve customer experience. With its advanced automation capabilities, including Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), businesses can automate their workflows and eliminate manual errors, freeing up valuable time and resources.

For instance, a global bank, a client of EdgeVerve, wanted to adopt RPA to enhance its operational efficiency. Still, the CTO was cautious due to the high failure rates of initial RPA implementations. They realized the need for an RPA center of excellence (CoE) and discovered AssistEdge Discover, which simplified the process selection and implementation journey. The bank successfully leveraged RPA to reduce manual errors, free up employees’ bandwidth, and reduce processing time. The RPA CoE efficiently supervised the program, allowing the bank to focus on strategic growth opportunities.

For more information, download the flipbook.

Hence, with the increasing adoption of automation technologies like AI, ML, and RPA, BPM is becoming more available and accessible to implement than ever before. Subsequently, companies that leverage BPM tools like AssistEdge can gain a significant competitive advantage by eliminating manual errors, automating repetitive tasks, and freeing up valuable resources to focus on high-value activities.