Industry Guidebook

Meet Business Process Management Demand

July 10, 2022

Picture this. You’re one of the largest beer manufacturers in the world, with thousands of employees and global name recognition. Your products have prominent locations in nearly every liquor store.

But your inventory management processes—including ordering new products and getting those products out to retailers—is an administrative nightmare. People in the field need to keep track of inventory, sales, product specs and more. But that information isn’t updated in real-time: instead, the back office emails spreadsheets to the field sales team every few hours. This leads to poor inventory control, frustrated sales people and unhappy customers.

This is the situation Carlsberg found themselves in at the end of 2013.

But just a few months later, Carlsberg had:

cut administrative time by up to 90%
drastically improved data quality and speed
eliminated their dependance on spreadsheets
How did they do it?
Through business process management.

Specifically, Carlsberg analyzed their business processes, discovered inefficiencies, and used BPM software to digitalize their inventory management and ordering processes. These changes meant that:

administrative staff weren’t constantly updating spreadsheets
field sales reps could check inventory in real-time
all employees were more productive and could devote time to more valuable tasks
The results Carlsberg saw from their BPM initiatives are great. But more importantly: they’re not unique. Nearly every business—from the biggest corporations to tiny startups—can benefit from BPM.

But before you jump in and start changing up your processes, it’s important to know what BPM is (and isn’t), how the BPM lifecycle works and how to measure the success of your BPM efforts.

The team here at Novacura have been helping businesses achieve BPM success for over 14 years. We’ve even created our own business process management tool, called Novacura Flow, that you can use to map, analyze, model and optimize your business processes—and connect your processes directly to your business systems, like your ERP, MES, CRM, and WMS. So it’s safe to say that we’re experts in business process management, and we know the ins and outs of BPM initiatives both large and small.

And now, we want to share our BPM knowledge with you.

So let’s get started.

BPM is a group of principles, methods and tools to design, analyze, execute and track business processes with the goal of getting more value out of them. This value might be internal—better efficiency, higher quality products, faster shipping times—or it might be customer value (better service, faster reply times, etc.).

BPM by Novacura - process mapping The official definition of BPM, according to bpm.com, is this:
Business Process Management (BPM) is a discipline involving any combination of modeling, automation, execution, control, measurement and optimization of business activity flows, in support of enterprise goals, spanning systems, employees, customers and partners within and beyond the enterprise

A business process is the way you deliver a product or service to your customers. Business processes provide structure and help you create repeatable, executable tasks. Without business processes, you wouldn’t be able to do the same thing twice—ever.

BPM by Novacura person mapping a process To put it another way: your business is made up of tasks, information, people, data and materials. A business process is the way these things interact with each other to reach a goal: build a unit of a product, complete an order, service a customer, close out the year-end budget, or whatever else you need to do to make your business run.

A business process might be something as simple as taking a phone message:

answer phone with standard greeting:
take message
give message to recipient

But it can also be quite large and detailed, involving multiple people and departments—like the process to manufacture a car.

Business processes are an asset, just like your company’s equipment, materials, data, real estate, patents and so on. While most of your business assets have to do with the “what” of your business (what you make, what you sell), your business processes are the “how” of your business. They are the way you do what you do. They’re what sets your business apart from the competition.

And they’re as valuable as everything else your company owns.

Some companies, like Amazon, have even patented their business processes as intellectual property.

You invest a lot of money and effort to get the best machines and keep them running in tip-top shape. The same should go for your business processes.

There are three types of business processes:

Operational processes. These are the processes where people “get things done”. In manufacturing, this might be a process for product assembly. In logistics, it might be a process for shipping deliveries. In warehouse management, it might be a process for receiving goods.
Management processes. These are the processes that oversee operations and make sure things are working properly. Things like quality assurance, budget oversight, and so on.
Support or governance processes. These are the processes that ensure the business is in compliance with regulations; things like accounting, technical support, staff training.

Your business—and every other business—run on a series of business processes. Sometimes those processes work really well. But sometimes, like with Carlsberg, they don’t. And that’s where business process management comes in.

If you answer “yes” to any of the following questions, then you should definitely consider BPM:

are my workers still managing data with a pen and paper?
is the same data being entered multiple times into different systems?
do workers spend a lot of time playing detective and/or searching for data in your systems?
does your business use a bunch of different single-purpose apps to handle business issues?
are customers complaining about bad, slow or confusing service?

Why? Because these are symptoms of processes that don’t work well. Sure, they might work in the sense that they get done. But that doesn’t mean they work efficiently, or easily, or well.

BPM is all about finding and removing inefficiencies. Removing pointless, repetitive work—like, for example, uploading the same data into 3 different places—frees up time for employees to focus on the work that actually creates value for your company. Carlsberg were able to reduce administrative work by up to 90% with BPM. How much time could your company save? How much more productive would people be if they didn’t have to “work around” inefficient processes?

Business process management isn’t a magic wand: it takes a lot of work to do well. It also requires a lot of planning, communication and education. So before you jump in, it’s important to know if your business is ready to put in the work.

Sometimes there can be push-back on BPM efforts. BPM can mean big changes to the way people do their jobs, and some people might be content with the status quo. Others may have gone through a failed BPM effort in the past, or just don’t see the point of trying something new. If your company culture is more reactive than proactive, getting buy-in for a BPM project might be hard.

In this first phase of BPM maturity, the organization becomes aware that their processes maybe aren’t as efficient as they could be. The goal is to uncover the root cause of operational issues. You might be monitoring the results of specific tasks, using dashboards for reporting, or monitoring results in some other way… and you’re noticing that there are places where things can be done better, but you’re not quite sure how to make them better.

The final phase of BPM maturity is about staying on top of changes. This is achieved by being agile. They must be willing and able to adjust processes to changing conditions, be they environmental, political, technological or anything else. It also means making pro-active changes when opportunities arise.

If your business can’t yet acknowledge that they have operational inefficiencies, then they might not be ready for BPM just yet. Instead, you might want to start by focusing on change management.

You’ve read through all the details, you’ve assessed your BPM maturity, and you’ve decided that BPM is the right thing for you. So, how do you actually do it?

There are five steps to business process management. Click on the links below to learn more about each step.

Analysis – in this section you’ll learn how to map and analyze your “as is” business processes. This is an important first step because you can’t improve what you don’t measure.

Side note: if you’re starting BPM from the very beginning, you’ll want to start by identifying your business processes. Learn more about process identification here.

Modelling – in this section you’ll learn how to create the new version of your business processes: the “to be” processes. Who should be on the BPM project team? How do you design a business process?

Implementation – You’ve worked on the processes. Now it’s time to talk about the two other crucial elements of BPM: the people and the technology. In this section you’ll learn how to choose the best BPM tool, and how to manage the “people” element of BPM.

Monitoring – this section shows you how to monitor the results of your BPM initiatives. You’ll learn about things like key performance indicators (KPIs), risk management and more.

Optimization – The end is just the beginning! Now that you’ve successfully optimized your processes, it’s time to talk about continuous improvement.

According to BPM expert Marlon Dumas, the goal of all BPM efforts is to maximize value. More specifically, he has defined 7 types of value that BPM can help provide:

transparency
quality
agility
integration
efficiency
compliance
networking

The first, and most important, of these values is transparency. Transparency into your business processes helps you:

get a clear view of how tasks are actually carried out
gain visibility into how all aspects of the business actually run
remove silos between departments and promote collaboration
better measure the impact of changes to processes
make proactive (instead of reactive) changes to processes
streamline organizational processes
eliminate waste (of time, money or resources)

Transparency into your business processes helps you make decisions, measure changes and manage risk more effectively. Moreover: without transparency, you can’t improve the other six values… because you need to know how your processes work before you can improve them.

So above all, a good business process is transparent. This means it’s easy to see exactly how it works, how it affects other processes and whether it’s running properly.

Other qualities of a good business process include:

It creates measurable value for your business: increased efficiency, better working conditions, better customer service, higher customer value, etc.
You can measure and prove the success of the business process by looking at key performance indicators (KPIs).
The process is linked to your business systems, ideally using some kind of business process management software (i.e. it’s not just a paper form or .pdf that no-one looks at: it’s something people actually use every day).
It minimizes the steps to process completion.
It’s easy to explain to others, especially new and/or inexperienced employees.
The process has an owner: someone who takes responsibility for the success of the process, monitors and reports on changes, and takes charge of continuous improvement efforts.
It’s easy to update the process and adapt it to changing conditions: it’s hard to know what your business will look like in a few years, so being able to change/update processes to fit changing business needs is very important.

“But my business processes work fine,” you say. “The work gets done, people aren’t working a bunch of overtime, and business is steady. Why would I want to change that?”

Maybe your business processes are 100% perfect: completely optimized, running at the top of their game, 24/7. But it’s more likely that you’ve become accustomed to working around inefficiencies.

Imagine a marketing team is asked to send an email to a specific group of customers. In order to get the list of customers, they have to:

export the data from the CRM
upload the data into the email marketing program

Not a big deal, except:

before they can upload the data, they have to clean it up, because the CRM export contains a whole bunch of useless fields
they also have to cross-check the list for duplicates because the CRM allows multiple contacts to have the same email address (and the email marketing program doesn’t)
and finally, they have to make sure every contact has the proper first name assigned because the email marketing program requires every contact to have a first name… and sometimes the data entered into the CRM isn’t complete.

The marketing team is aware that the process of downloading the data, cleaning it up, and uploading it to the email marketing program takes an hour. They’ve been through the email export/import process many times, so they’re used to it. They’ve budgeted time for that hour.

Now imagine you’re running a special promotion and want to send 40 different targeted emails to 40 different targeted lists over the course of a week.

The marketing team would probably have some objections.

It’s unfortunate, because email marketing generates a lot of sales, especially when you use those targeted lists. But they take a long time to set up, so the marketing department doesn’t send as many email campaigns as they’d like to.

Technically it does work: the job is completed. But if you were to connect the CRM data to the email marketing program through an API, the marketing team wouldn’t have to download, clean up, or upload data anymore—which reduces their workload by 1 hour per email. This means the marketing team can easily send out 40 different targeted emails, which in turn can lead to more sales, more profits and smiles all around.

Just because your business processes “work” doesn’t mean they’re at peak performance. It’s more than likely that with a little bit of analysis, you’ll find many places where your business processes can be better. And one little change—like the example above—can sometimes make a huge difference to your bottom line.

Ready to dive in? Start by identifying and analyzing your business processes.