5 reasons for process management

The Process Management market (a.k.a. BPA = Business Process Analysis or even sometimes used as a synonym for BPM = Business Process Management) is expected to grow at $16B by 2023, with a CAGR of 14% [MRF20]. But still people in different roles from different business units and across all industries ask what the value of process management actually is. Not only to bring it to the point for themselves, but also to prepare a well-founded argument for the senior management.

To answer this question right, it is crucial to shape what we are talking about. This is not just process modeling and automation. It is not just a time-boxed BPM project and a snapshot analysis of recorded business processes for quick wins. You need to achieve a common understanding that process management is a comprehensive approach for transforming businesses—thinking from the strategy of the design of change, implementing, executing and monitoring that change and reiterating [BPMI]. Once this understanding is shared by all participants, you can then talk about value.

1. Breaking up silos through a “lingua franca” and full transparency

Many organizations struggle with siloed operations, and miss the big picture including dependencies between different activities in end-to-end processes. Process management starts with a well thought-out design, tracking and monitoring business processes that are in place from initiation to completion [DI18], and from a detailed (step-wise) and aggregated point of view (process mining). This makes operations measurable, delivering all facts, figures and insights required to make decisions on all business levels. At the same time, this approach breaks silos and delivers a common language—a lingua franca— understood by everyone in the organization. Hence process management can bridge the communication gap between different departments, business and IT [BAL14].

2. Agile-respond to new circumstances

More than ever before, your company has to react fast to changes in the market, society, ecosystem, technology, and even on new regulations [BPMI, DI18]. Process management gives you the ability to adjust [BAL14, SH20] or create new ways of working, communicating them immediately to the workforce and ensuring adoption correspondingly. The evolution of processes is precisely documented, giving process owners the ability to see and predict the effect of changes from end to end [DI18]. Finally, there is a big difference between just reacting and being prepared to react in a sustainable way. And as you could see in the COVID-19 crisis, this is an important factor for the resilience of organizations worldwide.

3. Crystallizing best practices to constantly improve productivity

Process management enables process managers to predict the performance of new processes and the effects of changes made. This is key to prevent weak points and bottlenecks already from the beginning [BAL14]. In addition, you can identify repetitive tasks, redundancy and error-prone tasks, leading to highly focused automation initiatives with candidates that produce the biggest value to the business. This allows you to eliminate inefficiencies [DI18] and thus reduce cost and time, improve effectiveness, and ensure consistency in execution, caused by established standards. Finally, you can continuously improve your processes and crystallizing best practices.

4. Risk mitigation and compliance lead to organizational control

You need to follow rules whether you are talking about laws, industry-specific regulations and norms (e.g. ISO), compliance standards or self-imposed rules. This is not just the case for companies in regulated environments, just thinking about GDPR affecting all companies working with EU citizens as their customers. No overview of customer-data processing tasks implies missing possibilities to really ensure compliance of that important law. Reducing risks by adapting processes also improves organizational control [SH20]. While using process management, you have the ability to deal with changing regulations since processes are mapped out with a detailed workflow [DI18]. Therefore, compliance can be operationally conceptualized with the documentation available by monitoring on a detailed level. Finally, process management lets you integrate compliance into the process life cycle and deliver the input for internal and external audits.

5. Satisfaction of customers and employees

Employees are often under high pressure to perform faster and achieve more. Process management allows you to streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, eliminate waste and clearly define responsibilities [SH20]. People are able to concentrate on the things that matter and are less frustrated due to process complications [BAL14]. In addition, the workforce can collaborate with process managers and provide important input for improvement with firsthand ideas. This consequently improves buy-in, increases your employee happiness, and also simplifies and improves the interaction with your customers. Touchpoint owners are defined, and your employees can better focus on customers and their demand.

Business process management allows you to look into the organization and understand how things works from end to end. Although the journey often starts with design or documentation of business processes for a specific purpose— maybe for quality certification reasons (e.g. ISO9001) or for requirements engineering to select the right software—the value radically increases when you consider it comprehensively and when more people are involved. Then it becomes the cockpit of your organization with all the benefits mentioned before. Business process management tools support that approach from a technical point of view, and selecting the right one is critical. People need to work with it, needing to understand it intuitively; and it needs to be able to grow with your organizations through your process journey—from the initial mapping of processes to the management of your entire enterprise.