Business processes are the core activities of the company. One of the most popular systems to manage them is the bpm’online platform.
It’s a browser application with a “material design” style user interface, which is considered as one of the easiest to use. It shows information in the most convenient way – the menu consists of pictographic icons and every detail has free space around it, which helps the viewer to concentrate on it. The software is available at https://www.bpmonline.com/bpm-software
To apply it correctly and make the work more efficient, one should know about BPM.
What are business processes and how to manage them
A process is a series of actions aimed to achieve a certain goal. It consists of at least one activity, and may or may not have events and decision points. Usually, the ultimate goal is to satisfy the needs of a customer and to receive profits. The process may have a positive or a negative outcome. The positive one is getting outcome or satisfying the needs. A negative result is the increase of costs. There are primary processes that are the main actions of the enterprise – like producing goods and taking payment, and inner supplementary ones – like hiring workers and maintenance.
The aim of BPM is to “tweak” those processes and to find out whether they are really needed. One large automobile producer reduced an entire division from five hundred to 60 employees by disabling redundant paperwork.
To make a process more effective, you have to re-engineer it. Keep in mind the following principles:
- Gather the data in one source. It should be done only once.
- Just processing the data is inefficient. Those who do the real work, should provide all the needed information.
- Those who use the results of the process should be capable of gaining a control over it.
- Even if the resources are spread over a large territory, they should be centralized.
- Use the BPM tools to analyze, control and modify every change in the process.
Two mistakes of understanding business process management software
A common mistake is to think that BPM is just a hype, a trendy acronym. The last ten years of active BPM systems usage have shown that the companies that do not plan and manage their business processes have more than 90% chances of failure in the long run and 25% failure chance in the short run.
Another mistake is thinking of BPM software as of a silver bullet – that once you install it on your company’s computers, all the problems will be solved in a blink of an eye. It is said that automatization of a good process will make it better, but automatization of a bad process will make it only worse. If you make the exchange of papers automatic, you will just make it easier, but the redundant work remains.
Reasonable planning and having control over your business processes can ensure the business continuity. It is a cycle of planning, weighing the risks, analyzing the impact and selecting a suitable strategy of process execution.
Managing your processes with bpm’online
An example of the primary essential process is the selling of goods or services. The bpm’online platform provides a solution for the sales management. You can create a catalog of products in a tree form, where branches are the categories and leaves are the actual goods. You can filter or sort them by prices, names, tags or other attributes.
Managing client resources in the hospitality sector
Another example of business management software usage is the CRM platform. CRM is especially useful in the mass service. For example, a coffee shop network provides its clients with discount cards and registers them in the database. Before they add a new flavor, they launch a campaign in social media to get a feedback about the discounts from their customers. All the choices are stored in the DB (database) and the decision is made whether to add the new flavor to the constant menu or not.
Training
The management of processes is a complicated task that requires both education and experience. Students have courses of business process management, but they usually don’t cover the details and don’t teach how to use modern programs. The bpm’online education platform provides documentation, seminars and master classes on every feature of the engine. Training courses last up to one week, and the classes take up to four hours every day.
Modern business should develop fast, be flexible and efficient. Business process management programs can help the company to achieve this, and the bpm’online platform is one of the best solutions for it. The managers should be trained in both BPM theory and the actual utilization of the platform. The company should be prepared for core changes, as well as a reorganization of the entire divisions to achieve better efficiency.
