More than ever, companies today are looking for ways to cut costs, streamline operations and improve efficiencies. A number of timely trends in business, such as the threat of a recession and the migration to remote work, makes it a critical time to evaluate your business processes. Are they optimized for smooth operations at all levels? And what are the main drivers for prioritizing business process optimization?
What exactly is business process optimization? It’s the process of:
- Evaluating existing processes to highlight bottlenecks and holes
- Identifying areas where workflows and best practices need to be put in place
- Recognizing that the company and team would benefit from establishing processes and potential automation
- Dedicating the time to establishing processes and and enforcing them with the team
Business process optimization can solve some of your biggest business challenges
Let’s look at some of the most important reasons for establishing a business process management workflow.
1. Reduce business risks and compliance issues
Putting standard operating procedures in place doesn’t just benefit the company from an ROI perspective, it also protects company integrity and employees.
Business process optimization requires a deep evaluation of current operational procedures for the key workflows within the company. This exercise should identify the where and why of holes or potential vulnerabilities within process and procedures. It is the time to consider how regulatory compliance issues are handled - are your processes managing compliance effectively?
As your team works on optimizing these processes, they can put actions into place to close holes and avoid vulnerabilities. Contingency flows can be put in place. Business process optimization protects business continuity efforts, revenue and employees.
2. Eliminating bottlenecks and improving inefficient processes
One of the biggest reasons for making optimized processes a priority is to eliminate the certain inefficiencies and bottlenecks that arise due to lack of established workflows or best practices - or simply as processes need to change over time as business environments change.
Oftentimes these bottlenecks come from a lack of understanding of what actually needs to be done as part of a project or process, from repetitive tasks, and manual work that can be automated to minimize errors.
3. Improving the customer experience
When you hear about business process optimization, your first thought may not be about its impact on customers. But clearly, any exercise that eliminates errors, speeds delivery time, and increases efficiency is almost certainly going to improve the customer experience by default.
An important way to optimize business processes is to look at the customer experience first. What are your users complaining about? What are most of your support tickets focused on? What tasks take customers the longest to complete?
Optimizing the customer experience can be a highly effective way to realize better ROI.
4. Optimize company resources
Sometimes the process of evaluating your workflows and streamlining operations can be a painful one, because it shines a light on all the time and resources that are being wasted through inefficiencies.
The pain of this exercise may tempt your business and IT teams to avoid it, but the quicker you are able to streamline and trim the inefficiencies, the more effective your business operations will be, the happier your customers and employees will be, and the more business your company will be able to generate.
Bonitasoft understands what companies need to be successful and so we’ve built our BPM-based business process automation platform with acceleration of business process application delivery in mind.
3 ways to learn more:
- Build highly personalized, process-based applications today, for free, with our open source Bonita Community Edition
- See how you can reinvent your BPM. Watch our on demand Bonita Platform Demo.
- Interested in full project lifecycle support and services from development to operations? Try unlocking the power of Bonita Subscription Edition. Contact us to learn more.
