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Business process modelling (BPM), also known as business process mapping, is a way to chart and analyse your organisation’s processes. Over the last few decades, businesses and other organisations around the world have come to rely on BPM to better understand their operations and it’s become a vital tool for managers and decision-makers.
So why is BPM so important and advantageous for decision-makers? This article outlines what business process modelling involves and why it can be beneficial for businesses.
What’s business process modelling?
In most cases, businesses have a lot of complex moving parts and, as with a business plan, BPM helps you better understand how you can reach your business goals. It does this by providing visual or graphic elements that clearly map out processes or workflows.
These can encompass activities, conditions, relationships, or events. These charts will identify each part or step of your workflows from start to finish, to give you a complete overview of all the tasks in your business processes.
Advantages of business process modelling
1. Quality of analysis
This type of visualisation of your processes allows you to better understand and manage them for greater efficiency, for continuous improvement. The most complex processes can be easily visualised, analysed, and communicated through roadmaps, flowcharts, icons, notations, and diagrams.
With these diagrams, you’re not relying on text-only descriptions that can be ambiguous and open to interpretations. As such, your subject matter experts and decision-makers can go deeper in their discussions and achieve clarity and accuracy in their communications with each other.
2. Collaborative understanding
Business process modelling also allows your teams to have a clear idea about what they’re supposed to do. It gives you a standardised, readily understood means to communicating processes, thereby supporting the smooth exchange of process-improvement ideas.
Managers can easily instruct and train team members. You’ll find it easier to train new staff in your processes with these documented processes as well. Where processes integrate more technical IT elements, BPM becomes even more important for enabling non-IT experts to grasp workflows.
3, Automating processes
For automating processes, BPM is also vital. It gives you a chance to outline your complete process model, break it down into individual tasks, and optimise the process before it can be successfully automated.
4. Process documentation and transparency
BPM lets you document processes effortlessly. Well-documented workflows empower organisations and allow those in charge to navigate their operations. It facilitates consistency, trackability, and team focus on stated goals. Process documentation leads to rapid knowledge transfer and the preservation of know-how if key staff members leave the organisation.
In addition, process documentation supports transparency across the organisation by making it clear what work activities are to be performed by specified team members and to given standards. This means employees know exactly who to go to when issues arise. Documentation is also essential for understanding and enhancing your existing business processes.
5. Improved and streamlined workflows
Your organisation’s processes and related business and IT systems should be constantly evolving to keep up with changes in technology and business needs. The reality is processes tend to be updated on an ad-hoc, slow basis. With BPM, your analysts and decision-makers can, in many cases, introduce improvements quickly, eliminating bottlenecks and productivity lags and allowing your processes to become more agile and efficient.
6. Strategic alignment
By and large, using BPM can facilitate better alignment with your organisation’s core business and IT strategies. BPM lets you find any gaps you might have between your existing processes and your strategic vision. You can use BPM to work out the exact steps, at an operational level, that you need to take to achieve certain strategic goals. Any changes you make to the processes for improved performance are known as business process reengineering.
7. Defining best practice
Defining best practice standards encourages team members, line managers, and senior decision-makers to perform at their best. BPM is a great way to define what best practice looks like in your business’s operations. At a practical level, it helps you streamline and standardise how employees perform their tasks.
Clearly defined and well-conceived processes are important for uniformity, control, and efficiency. You can avoid duplication of steps and prevent team members from having to do guesswork or introducing unnecessary complexity in tasks. By defining and formalising best practices in your operations, your business will likely be more compliant in terms of your internal standards as well as in terms of legal requirements.
8. Increase competitive advantage
Utilising BPM can lead to significant competitive advantage for your organisation, by empowering you to continuously adapt and improve your operational processes. The more efficiently your teams carry out your processes, the more productive they are and the more efficient your organisation’s utilisation of resources and time. This goes to your competitive advantage as well as profitability.
9. Increased accountability and engagement
As mentioned above, BPM boosts transparency and allows everyone in the organisation to understand who’s responsible for which workflows and the expected quality or standards that apply. As a result, this transparency, along with the fact your employees will have clearly defined workflows, could increase accountability.
Accountability can improve employee engagement. When you provide your team members with specific, well-defined tasks and outcomes, they’re more likely to feel responsible, empowered, and engaged in their work.
10. Prevent knowledge loss
BPM can prevent knowledge loss that can happen with staff turnover. With detailed documentation on how each role performs processes, you can retain knowledge of their responsibilities and so future-proof your business against this type of knowledge loss. The outcomes include no overreliance on specific team members, along with smooth transitions and minimal disruptions to workflows when you onboard new staff.
Conclusion
Business process modelling is an integral element in any business management strategy, allowing everyone from team members to top decision makers to understand processes and carry out their responsibilities with greater clarity and accountability. It encourages a mindset of continuous improvement within organisations and facilitates the exchange of ideas about process improvements.
Used correctly, BPM can make your organisation more agile, responsive, and competitive. Ultimately, BPM gives you a powerful toolset to improve your business performance, by achieving process efficiencies in providing your services or products.
Author Bio
| Name: Jacqui Coombe
Bio: Jacqueline Coombe is an experienced mentor and leader in the digital world. As Head of Content Marketing, she manages a team of 8 driven and innovative marketers and leads by example in her management style. Jacqueline has acted as guest lecturer at establishments such as General Assembly Sydney, and is a frequent attendee of leadership and management seminars to better improve her skills. |
