In the current context of increasingly changing and competitive market, characterized notoriously by the use of new information technologies, companies need flexibility and agility to adapt to changes and new customer needs.
Generally, companies have software and systems specially developed and/or optimized for their situation at a given moment, but it often happens that when new challenges are faced, these systems do not allow to make changes in a simple and agile way. This is when a process management system such as BPM becomes relevant.
BPM stands for Business Process Management. In theory, it defines a work methodology that aims to improve the efficiency of the organization through a series of actions to systematize and optimize business processes, allowing better decision-making, comprehensive vision of the business, and facilitating collaboration with a customer approach.
On the practical side, it focuses on technology. BPM technology increases visibility of business processes, improving their understanding and ensuring their control. It is a tool that promotes continuous improvement, without the need of large investments, since it can generally be integrated with any other management software already in use.
More precisely, a BPM tool is an application conceptualized for the design, management, and monitoring of processes, and it is used to automate, measure, and optimize business operations. Through workflows and collaboration, BPM provides metrics and KPIs with which managers can improve their decision-making and check if their objectives are being achieved, so that they know if their strategies are being effective or need correction.
Among the most used BPM applications are: (1) those that integrate databases, allowing connection and exchange of information between the organization's databases, integrating it into forms and workflows; (2) those of web services, which allow access to all types of data, stored in databases, file systems or email directly through the web; (3) those of email servers, which can extract content of the entering emails and use it to fill in form fields or attach to a workflow; (4) Social and Workflow Integration BPM, which allows to create workflows associated with social networking events, such as “tweets”, “likes”, Facebook comments or LinkedIn posts.
By implementing BPM technology, not only are processes optimized and automated, but also the way that people and the company work is being transformed to achieve continuous improvement, based on adaptability to changes, as well as staff motivation and commitment by collaborating and participating in the processes.
There are many benefits for the business using BPM, mainly:
- Transparency, since it makes processes visible, creating reliability.
- Greater control, by allowing to follow and compare the progress of processes, enabling a complete picture of the business in real time.
- Increased productivity, with optimized processes.
- Cost reduction, achieving higher productivity with fewer resources, reducing waste.
- Automation, which eliminates rework, accumulation, and delay in processes, generating evidence of activities with easy access to data.
As a result of all the above, the elements for better management are provided, facilitating decision-making, all of which increases competitiveness of the company and prepares it to cope with the constant challenges of the future.
It is time to bet on technology for business process management, and progressively eliminate inefficiencies while boosting the strengths on which the competitive advantage of the business is based.
