Driving Process Efficiency with Business Process Management Software

Tomasz Rezik, Care Management

In the new digital landscape, businesses must be able to modernize their processes, reduce costs, and adapt in an age of constant change.

As a result, more executives are turning to business process management software (also known as business process modeling software) from Dassault Systèmes to support process design automation, implement optimal workflows, and ensure processes are not just documented, but monitored and improved in real time. By providing visibility and control to model and execute processes, organizations are able to improve efficiency, productivity, and profitability. For this reason, BPM tools have become a critical component of digital transformation initiatives in countless industries.

Why Businesses Need to See How their Processes are Performing

The biggest problem many companies face is that they simply do not know how well or poorly their existing processes are running in practice. Processes can easily become unwieldy and decentralized; teams, systems, and partners are often spread out geographically, and old, ad hoc workarounds like offline documents or manual processes exist in silos that make it hard to pinpoint inefficiencies and bottlenecks. With a business process management (BPM) solution, decision makers can obtain a bird's-eye view of the processes and workflows that make up the organization, and find out where the process starts, stops, or is adding value. Unfortunately, solving problems like these is easier said than done. Many organizations lack a 360-degree view of end-to-end enterprise processes and the ability to measure how effectively these processes run. Business process management software can bring together process data and workflows across different departments in order to measure process effectiveness and efficiency.

Companies that invest in improving the efficiency and run-time operations of their processes gain a lot in terms of horsepower and better adapt to changes in the business environment. That is why Business process management (BPM) tools are so essential—they can have the ability to enable organizations to achieve other key business goals like long-term growth and sustainability. Not only can executives ensure that business processes are performing as expected, but they can also be prepared when these processes change or adapt over time.

Capabilities to Drive Process Innovation

Newer tools for Business process management (BPM) software provide a set of key capabilities that can drive a measurable impact in process innovation.

• Process Modeling and Simulations – Teams can model out their existing processes and run simulations in order to learn how the process is expected to run and what the expected results are. They can also model simulations and quickly determine what might happen on live process flows before making the changes.

• Automation and Orchestration – Many repetitive tasks can be automated, including approval workflows, data entry, reporting, and much more.

• Integration Across Systems – Integrating with enterprise applications (like HR, finance, ERP, SCM, and more) ensures that data can flow through the system and across the organization.

• Real-time Monitoring and Analytics – Dashboards, reports, and alerts ensure that executives can see how well the process is running and take action if something is wrong.

These features can help ensure that your enterprise can support a culture of continuous improvement and long-term business value.

Using BPM as a means to a Digital Transformation End

The practice of digital business transformation extends beyond business process automation and into how businesses operate. That is where business process management (BPM) software can be an excellent help. Through standardizing business processes, organizations are able to scale how they do business, support activities amongst employees, and increase visibility and controls needed to meet various regulatory requirements.

Financial services firms might use BPM tools to automate risk controls in the loan-approval process to meet compliance requirements while reducing turnaround times. A manufacturer might adopt a BPM platform to orchestrate the movement of goods and materials from suppliers to the factory floor to distributors. And a hospital might deploy a BPM system to streamline patient onboarding and billing to improve patient care and operational efficiency.

These examples illustrate the ways BPM platforms help organizations link strategy to execution — translating business mandates into specific, repeatable processes that the organization can monitor, measure, and automate.

The Power of Transparency and Accountability

Another key benefit of BPM systems is their ability to improve transparency and foster collaboration across functional teams. With BPM, processes are visualized and accessible to participants. Everyone can see which actions deliver the desired outcomes. The effect is to demolish the functional silos that tend to isolate staff in specific roles (and departments). By giving staff a line of sight into how their work influences the work of others (and contributes to shared goals), BPM creates shared accountability.

BPM platforms can also enable organizations to more rapidly adapt to change. Whether the change is regulatory, due to shifts in market conditions, supply chain constraints, or evolving customer expectations, leaders can reconfigure processes to keep the business on course with minimal disruption. In today’s fast-paced global business environment, the ability to pivot processes quickly in response to changing conditions is a competitive advantage.

The Future of Work Unleashed

BPM, in concert with AI and machine learning, will ultimately evolve into predictive process management. Instead of simply managing the present and responding to challenges as they crop up, organizations that embrace next-generation AI-powered BPM systems will increasingly anticipate challenges before they appear — that is, to identify weak signals as they emerge. This ability to look around the corner — to foresee problems — will make real-time decision-making more proactive.

Organizations that take advantage of the latest AI- and machine learning-powered BPM tools will not only boost productivity and streamline decision-making and collaboration. They will deliver a better experience for customers, an enhanced culture for employees, and greater bottom-line performance over time. In effect, BPM will no longer be about process optimization; it will be about building smart, agile companies.