Business process management (BPM) has become an essential discipline for companies looking to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and deliver better customer experiences. By taking a process-centric approach, organizations can identify and eliminate bottlenecks, redundant or manual work, and other forms of waste across departments.
However, BPM initiatives often fail to deliver their full potential value due to poor planning, lack of buy-in, or flawed execution. Avoid these pitfalls by following these 10 proven best practices:
1. Secure Executive Sponsorship
Before kicking off any kind of BPM program, you need to have an executive sponsor on board. This leader will champion your efforts across the organization, provide necessary resources and funding, and help overcome resistance to change. Lacking this high-level endorsement severely hinders your likelihood of success.
Identify an executive whose role relates closely to the processes being improved, such as the heads of operations, customer service, or IT. Demonstrate how BPM aligns with larger strategic goals and benefits their department specifically. Financial incentive plans can further motivate executive sponsors to actively participate and promote adoption.
For example, a leading healthcare network sought to optimize its patient discharge process to increase bed turnover rates and revenue. By highlighting how this project would help the Chief Nursing Officer meet her capacity expansion targets, the analyst secured buy-in to pilot a redesigned workflow incorporating automation. This demonstrable business case got the CNO advocating for broader implementation approval.
2. Define Your Business Objectives
The most common downfall is initiating BPM without clear objectives tied to tangible business outcomes. This leads teams to get lost in the minutiae of workflows without furthering real goals.
Before mapping your as-is processes, clarify your priorities such as:
- Improving customer satisfaction scores by 15%
- Reducing order processing costs by 30%
- Decreasing software development lifecycles by 2 months
Continually reference these targets to ensure your process changes stay focused on what matters most.
For example, a retail bank set goals to improve net promoter scores by 20 points and cut on-boarding processing times by 50%. All process redesigns and automation ROI projections were measured against contributing to these targets. Within a year, the bank exceeded both goals – raising NPS by 25 points and reducing average on-boarding from 2 weeks to 3 days.
3. Understand Current Processes First
It’s impossible to properly improve processes you don’t fully understand in their present state. Many groups skip this critical step and end up optimizing processes that no one actually adheres to.
Thoroughly document all activities, decision points, inputs and outputs across each process flow. Resist hand waving through complex sub-processes and identify every nuance that might impact performance or costs.
Process mining technology can automatically generate as-is flow diagrams from system logs to avoid biased or incomplete views. Lean Six Sigma techniques like RACI matrices further help detail roles and responsibilities.
This upfront analysis provides an essential baseline for quantifying existing inefficiencies and waste to address.
For example, a process mining tool provided a large bank clear visualization of 80,000+ real purchase loan applications over 12 months. This uncovered over 800 distinct process variants indicating serious case handling inconsistencies for what directors assumed was a standardized workflow. By spotlighting specific broken points in the end-to-end sequence, optimizers could target highest impact areas to fix.
4. Re-Engineer With Future Goals in Mind
Too often process improvements take a narrow view focusing only on minor issues in isolation. Step back and re-engineer processes holistically based on your desired future state vision.
Brainstorm innovations like self-service portals, intelligent automation, staff specialization, policy changes and more that could transform how work gets handled. This macro-level redesign accounts for evolving customer expectations, technological disruptions, growth plans and competitive forces as well.
Although radical change carries short-term costs, the long-term benefits typically justify investment. Pilot revised processes on small groups first to demonstrate value before broader rollout.
For example, one insurance firm aiming to enable straight-through processing for 80% of claims redesigned workflows from the ground up. Instead of tweaking old manual steps, they adopted AI triage, automated validations and RPA bots to handle mundane work. This freed up staff to focus on complex claims. By cutting processing times from 16 days to 1 hour for most filings, they hit targeted STP rates in four months post-launch.
5. Prioritize Customer Experience
Today’s consumers have high expectations for service quality and convenience. Failing to make customer satisfaction an integral part of BPM will severely hurt customer retention and growth.
Identify pain points within current processes that negatively impact customers. Common examples include convoluted online purchase workflows, frustrating self-service portals, or constantly getting transferred between departments.
Design seamless processes that minimize customer effort and delight at every touchpoint. User test revised workflows to validate ease-of-use and identify further refinements. Journey mapping and voice-of-the-customer input helps reveal optimal designs.
For example, a software company mapped the steps users took submitting help desk tickets. They found an incredibly complex UI that made it unclear to categorize issues upfront, often leading to misrouted assignments and back-and-forth conversations. By simplifying the intake form and leveraging machine learning to auto-tag submissions, first response times improved over 35%. Customer effort score ratings increased by 20% following the changes.
6. Address People and Change Management
Even the most efficient processes fail if employees lack readiness or willingness to adopt them. Unfortunately BPM leaders often overlook serious change management considerations.
Assess organizational change capacity using frameworks like McKinsey’s 7S model examining shared values, skills, style, staff and structures. Identify across roles, locations and generations where resistance may arise. Tailor communication strategies and training programs specifically for these user segments versus one-size-fits-all approaches.
Incentivize process adherence via compensation plans and performance evaluations. Continuous reinforcement through internal marketing sustains engagement long-term.
For example, technology changes often hit call centers handling high volume repeating tasks. One insurance company anticipated resistance fixing claims processes given reps’ average tenure of 15 years using legacy systems. They targeted communications to address common automation fears like job losses and learned helplessness. After extensive upfront change management prep, 95% of staff embraced the updated solution.
7. Implement Supportive Technology
New process designs should integrate automation, analytics and collaboration tools that assist users and enforce standards. The highest ROI comes from first optimizing human-driven processes before adding technology.
Common platforms like business process management (BPM) suites, workflow automation software, and robotic process automation (RPA) provide drag-and-drop environments for codifying processes without programming. Built-in dashboards monitor activity while self-service portals, chatbots and email handling reduce manual tasks.
Prioritize high-volume transactional processes like invoice or claims processing which lend themselves well to automation. Calculate breakeven points for proposed tech investments based on potential efficiency gains.
For example, by combining process mining, RPA and OCR technology, one logistics provider automated over 70% of their trade document processing workflows in just 10 months. This delivered an exceptional 650% single year ROI by enabling dynamic bot scaling to handle seasonal spike volumes without expanding staff.
8. Define Process Metrics and KPIs
The old adage “what gets measured gets improved” rings very true for BPM programs. Establish key process indicators (KPIs) aligned to your predefined business objectives to gauge performance gains.
KPIs should provide quantitative insight versus subjective opinions. Standard metrics include cost, cycle or processing times, error rates, output volume and customer satisfaction scores. Ensure everyone agrees on calculation formulas and required supporting data.
Set performance targets based on benchmarking industry best practices, not just incremental improvements. Data transparency via central dashboards keeps all stakeholders accountable to expectations.
