Seeking process improvement is not optional anymore in today’s fast-changing and competitive business environments.
What is business process management?
To have a clear understanding of business process management (BPM), we need first to know what do we mean by “a business process”:
A business process is a collection of related tasks performed in a specific sequence to accomplish a specific organizational goal.
So,
Business process management is the practice of re-designing and optimizing an organization’s business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in productivity, cycle times and quality.
It’s an ongoing practice for process improvement that. helps to reduce mistakes and miscommunication which is a very common issue in many organizations.
And our goal is to find out a framework that helps us improve our processes using this powerful concept in today’s business, business process management (BPM).
The importance of BPM to process improvement
Many organizations use business process management (BPM) for a variety of reasons and more companies are seeking to take advantage of BPM as they are realizing its power and its impact on the future of business.
Well-executed BPM can cut waste, reduce errors, save time and generate better products and services and this indicates it’s all about continuous delivery of improvements such as:
- Cutting costs: streamlining processes and eliminating non-productive activities can save you lots of efforts and costs.
- Increase efficiency and effectiveness: BPM enables you to monitor and control processes as you can realize and develop relevant and important data about your processes. This results in better visibility, making it possible to identify and remove bottlenecks, eliminates redundant steps, and increases productivity.
- Improved flexibility and agility: Business process management fits your needs as your organization grows and scales and adapts to changes quickly.
- Transparency and Better visibility: Business process management facilitates collaboration among employees and drives more engagement and establishes clear responsibilities and accountability.
- More satisfied team members: processes are getting simplified and repetitive time-consuming tasks that are considered boring are automated and employees can focus on more productive activities.
Steps to Simplify and Streamline business process improvement by BPM
Plan and Analyze your existing processes
First, Determine the processes you want to improve. As these processes don’t move you toward your established goals and represent a problem requiring the most time, or causing the most delays or being a reason for declining quality.
Then start documenting the processes and the tasks needed to complete each process and It’s important to explore each task in detail, as some processes may contain sub-tasks that you’re not aware of. Ask people who work on the process regularly to ensure that you don’t overlook anything important.
After that, you should prioritize them, rank each process in the order of importance, or rate on a scale of one to 10. This helps you focus on areas that have the highest potential for improving your work.
Now, take the action and redesign the process and change or modify any tasks have been identified as a problem. It’s best to ask staff members who are involved in the process. They can provide ideas about any common issues and new approaches to handling the problem. And it’s also more useful to get them involved at an early stage because you will gain their buy-in.
Now, you and with the relevant people will brainstorm possible solutions to address the identified problems and then narrow down these solutions to the most applicable ones that will have the most desired impact on the process improvement by understanding the full consequences of these ideas.
Organize and acquire resources
You need to acquire the needed resources to implement the redesigned process.
So make sure there must be sufficient staff, raw materials, and capital so that you can run the improved process smoothly.
List everything from staff, capital, and materials that will help achieve the goal of the improvement process.
the new processes can function well if it is well-organized and everything is properly put in its place.
Automate and streamline
You are looking for non-value tasks you can remove to streamline the process.
And any repetitive tasks that consume a lot of time, so you can automate them and let your staff focus on more productive steps. This will make your processes gain a productive momentum because your tasks are coordinated in a way that allows your processes to form smooth-running and time-saving workflow.
Implement and communicate change
It’s likely that improving your business process will require to make changes. This means new procedures take their time to implement as employees got comfortable to the old procedures. So you have to explain to them that the new process is there to help everyone to work more easily and be more productive.
Training the staff and make them take part in the early stages of the process are great ways for the success of the change process.
Control and monitor the process
At this point, you need to review how the new processes are performing and you should know exactly whether the new changes are in conformity with the plan of process improvement that you want to achieve. by closely monitoring how things are carried out, you will recognize and fix problems as they appear.
To sum up
It is important to streamline and simplify business processes which is a valuable task that requires an accurate study and collaborative work.
Steps to Simplify and Streamline business process improvement by BPM:
- Plan and Analyze your existing processes
- Organize and acquire resources
- Automate and streamline
- Implement and communicate change
- Control and monitor the process
Business process management puts its heart into process improvement and this means continuous improvements to your processes to encourage smoother procedures, more efficient workflow and overall business growth.