The days when enterprises were operating on processes found in people’s heads, guesswork, and paper how-to-do checklists are long ago gone. In today’s highly competitive and fierce environment with ever-shifting market trends and increasing regulatory pressures, it is imperative to automate digital processes that are fully scalable and traceable. Properly documented digital business processes (also referred as operations, procedures, workflows, algorithms) are the pillars of any organization’s success and profitability as they:
- describe the sequence of tasks and activities that must be carried out to help for-profit companies attain their well-defined goals;
- assign the roles and responsibilities for every user engaged in the processes;
- keep the personnel motivated owing to KPIs specified for every instance of a process;
- provide the teams with all necessary instruments to do their work quickly and effortlessly;
- facilitate a smooth collaboration between teams;
- promote a quick training of new employees.
The need for complete business process lifecycle management forces institutions to deploy online BPM software, which is aimed at helping organizations streamline key business operations, minimize the use of resources, eliminate error-prone manual efforts, and boost overall performance. Put it simply, BPM systems can make companies more effective and cost-efficient.
The idea of a BPM-approach is to move companies towards greater flexibility and transparency. To achieve this, trusted BPM platforms like bpm’online (https://www.bpmonline.com) provide a sophisticated toolbox, with the help of which participants can create, visualize, simulate, deploy, monitor, share, and modify company-wide processes using web-based forms and elements without any programming skills.
The visual interface of online BPM software lets the employees draw the flowcharts of future processes in an intuitive drag-n-drop manner on an open-source canvas and configure them to an organization’s specific needs by adding unique steps to a process map. These easy-to-understand diagrams reflect how data, activities, and people must function and communicate within a process to generate the maximum value for a business. By having processes mapped and visualized, the users can clearly see what factors influence the process efficiency and what changes must be introduced to detect bottlenecks and prevent lapses.
Yet the functionality of robust online business process management software goes beyond simple process modeling. Actually, this kind of software can address many other business challenges.
In what way can online BPM software be helpful?
Solid BPM programs can solve many pressing issues that modern companies face day-by-day including:
- Lack of accuracy. The users of professional BPM software can eliminate redundant process activities and outline business rules for every workflow, hence enabling for better decision-making.
- Poor compliance. Powerful BPM solutions allow for building processes that fully comply with industry and legal regulations while ensuring that all the necessary steps are followed and required documents are generated throughout every process. Smart BPM suites like bpm’online can even report on compliance activities.
- Inconsistent communication. A good BPM system can be very useful in fostering effective collaboration between teams as it provides a single communication panel that supports audio/video conferencing, chat/messaging, discussion boards, and an interactive online community (https://community.bpmonline.com/).
- Week business agility. A fine online BPM solution provides its users with well-documented business processes, which can be refined on-the-fly so that there is no need to rely on the people’s informal knowledge when it comes to handling exceptions or dealing with new business opportunities.
- Low efficiency. BPM tools can promote a significant reduction in costs by making mission-critical processes more efficient in respect of time, money, resources, and efforts. Also, online BPM software can support real-time performance monitoring, which enables better resource utilization and minimization of disruptions.
What features does a good online BPM software provide?
To help companies operate in a more effective and efficient way, advanced cloud-oriented BPM systems are required to provide the tools as follows:
- A powerful process studio with unlimited templates and forms to build, configure, and run the workflows in a matter of minutes.
- Task management with custom notifications and to-do-lists to delegate tasks to the users and notify the process owners on delays, exceptions or pending actions.
- Document management to manage any type of documents within the online BPM software and attach them to the processes.
- Extensive analytics and process history to keep an eye on how well the existing processes and their users are performing and present these results in customizable graphs and reports.
- CRM integration to enable organizations develop processes for sales, marketing, and customer service.
- Project management to empower managers to plan different campaigns and evaluate their success.
- Business rule engine to change the business policies and statements within the business process management
- Social collaboration tools to ensure multichannel cooperation between team members and departments.
- Smooth synchronization with Google apps and other third-party systems to support hassle-free data migration.
- Mobile deployment of online BPM software to initiate a process creation, execution, and optimization on any device.
- Unlimited customization to allow for building custom business processes tailored to a company’s unique requirements.