Business Process Management (BPM) has emerged as a crucial discipline that empowers businesses to achieve goals such as enhance efficiency, cut costs, and improve customer satisfaction by optimizing and streamlining their operations. This guide will provide a comprehensive overview of BPM, its key components, benefits, and best practices.
What is BPM?
Business Process Management is a proactive way of managing business processes in a department or enterprise-wide to increase efficiency, productivity, innovation, and customer satisfaction by automating, improving or optimizing business processes. It is used to create, enhance, monitor, analyze, control, and optimize operational business processes by utilizing people, processes, and technology.
Business Process Management can be used to distribute work within an organization to different work groups, where specialized processing can take place. Process Management routes data, referenced by process instances, to designated people or activities, where predefined rules are applied and actions are performed based on specified conditions.
- BPM tools help resolve many IT issues such as central management of data, increasing transparency in execution, flexibility for easy adaptability to business needs, and easy integration of other applications within the enterprise through Service Oriented Architecture [SOA]. BPM enables to have a common platform for communication between all IT applications within the enterprise.
- BPM helps enterprise to add value to the services offered to customers through competitive differentiation with other vendors
- BPM enables enterprises to reduce overall costs in the execution of business operations
- Tight integration of all teams, departments, companies and enterprises globally through BPM
- BPM helps build and optimize business processes
Once BPM systems are implemented at the production level, they can deliver a detailed view of business performance, this helps an organization to optimize their business processes and achieve better cost savings.
Business Process Management is implemented by breaking large and complicated processes into small subprocesses each of which has a state/activity. A state/activity represents a particular stage where action needs to be performed by a person or a team. Based on the intelligent decisions made at the stage the process is routed to another stage. Close monitoring of these states/activities using BPM reporting tools, helps the enterprise analyze the performance of a process at each level. Constant improvisation through innovation and simulation enables the achievement of ultimate success that is in the form of tangible and intangible benefits. The entire process includes content, documents, collaborative tools and business intelligence tools.
Business Processes change from time to time. In order to stay ahead of the competition, Enterprises have to incorporate constant reformation and follow best practices. While accepting these changes in a manual approach is tedious, complicated and erroneous, having process management eases the change making it interesting, simplified and right.
In the early 1990s with help of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and Quality Assurance (QA), mangers used to analyze business processes. Few processes such as procurement, human resource, and accounts payable which are more department specific have been analyzed and automated using applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Huge investments have been made by enterprises to streamline business processes. Enterprise has been successful in implementing and managing processes that are within a department such as the Human Resource and Accounts department, however, most of the applications either failed or were constrained in managing processes between departments. Proper visibility of processes to managers and functional units was a major drawback.
However, with a focused management vision and the right solution, enterprises can reduce the barriers faced in the path of BPM embracement.
Components of BPM:
A BPM suite consists of four vital components that help in gaining an advantage:
• Business Process and Rules [BPR] – An interface for modeling and executing business processes and rules including workflows using BPM tools such as Microsoft Visio, Workflow Designers, and Process Engines.
• Enterprise Content Management [ECM] – A system that helps manage enterprise-level documents in a central storage system in a well-structured format using BPM tools for scanning, indexing, document management and archiving. Documents such as images and other intellectual information are digitized and stored in the ECM with industry compliance and security.
• Collaboration Tools [CT] — A platform enabling communication and collaboration between teams, departments, companies and enterprises through intranet email and messaging systems, discussion forums, dynamic workspace, and team sites.
• Business Intelligence [BI] — Helping generate a transparent report of the productivity of the enterprise, these BPM tools enable improving the efficiency of processes and achieving desirable ROI. BPM tools such as dynamic reporting and dashboards help real-time monitor of business processes to identify trends and opportunities for optimization of business processes.
Read also: What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
4 Stage Business Process Management Execution
Business Process Management should never be treated as an off-the-shelf application that can be designed, developed, and implemented overnight. It is an evolutionary process that begins with planning and strategic organizational processes and ends with fine tune optimization of the processes to achieve better Return on Investment.
BPM tools enable organizations to manage their information/data in an organized fashion in compliance with industry standards and automate business processes which eliminate errors in execution and optimization of these processes.
Execution of Business Process Management is classified into four stages:
Strategize and Plan
- Understand the existing organizational process
- Analyze those processes that can be automated using BPM tools.
- Justify and set roadmaps for implementation of those processes through simulation, proof of concepts, estimation of benefits anticipated by the automation
- Identify resources needs and threats involved in process automation.
- Work with Stakeholders to identify organizational goals.
Assess Competencies
- Identify champions of each process and find out factors that could strengthen the cause of BPM implementation.
- Identify processes and techniques of automation based on experience
- Assess competencies that are available in both internal and external sources including infrastructure and human resources.
Implement Business Process
- Set organizational structures based on the process using tools such as Workflow / Process designers, Visio and Flow diagrams.
- Set activity and task for each account involved in the business process.
- Set roles and positions with permissions to these accounts
- Set and share goals, plans, actions, and milestones with stakeholders
- Implement the action plan and provide relevant reports
Operate and Evolve
- Strive to achieve milestones and goals
- Evaluate business process and success achieved against the objectives
- Identify areas that could be improved for better performance
- Optimize those areas of business processes.
- Resolve critical issues and plan subsequent optimization initiatives.
Business Process Management in context of Healthcare
BPM has become vital part of the Healthcare industry. People Process, Place and Products are so closely interlinked with each other that without efficient steering using BPM tools, healthcare IT systems will fall apart and ultimately fail.
Hospitals deploy BPM system to improve their quality of services offered to patients by streamlining supporting processes from patient information management to vendors dealing with pharmaceutical products and medicines.
Clinical Research Organizations (CRO) use this newly emerging BPM (Business Process Management) enabled solutions to manage, optimize and automate the clinical trial processes across the studies.
Medical Representatives and Organizations (MR) use BPM tools such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to manage relationship with their customers, send newsletters and automate relationship management
Drug Manufacturing Companies have been using BPM systems to automate business processes between departments, and manage their unstructured information using Workflow and Document Management Systems [WDMS]
Business Values
BPM technology for healthcare solutions will enable you to achieve the following:
- Enhanced R&D productivity
- Reduction in time-to-market for new drug/device and improvement in supply chain efficiencies
- Accurate diagnostics and quality treatments
- Accurate reimbursements
- Cost-effective and efficient operations
Benefits
BPM in the Healthcare Industry can create focused, effective, and sustained practices that can enable companies to implement systems that will make them more successful, efficient, and profitable to achieve the following benefits:
- Enhanced Patient Experience: By optimizing processes and reducing wait times, BPM contributes to a more positive and efficient patient experience.
- Improved Clinical Efficiency: Automation of administrative tasks and streamlined workflows allows healthcare providers to focus more on patient care, improving clinical efficiency.
- Cost Reduction: BPM helps in identifying cost-saving opportunities by streamlining processes, reducing errors, and optimizing resource utilization.
- Data Accuracy and Security: Integration with BPM ensures the accuracy and security of patient data, supporting healthcare organizations in maintaining compliance with data protection regulations.
- Adaptability to Change: BPM provides healthcare organizations with the agility to adapt to changes in regulations, technology, and patient needs, ensuring long-term sustainability.
Business Process Management proves to be a valuable ally for organizations striving to deliver high-quality, patient-centric care. By optimizing workflows, improving efficiency, and leveraging technology, BPM not only enhances the operational aspects of healthcare but also contributes to better patient outcomes and overall satisfaction. As healthcare continues to embrace digital transformation, BPM will remain a key driver of success for organizations seeking to navigate the complexities of the industry.
