Rapid technological change is leading to the development of new tools and business capabilities at an unprecedented rate. How do you keep up with the growing potential of technology opportunities and discern what is optimal for your organization? While new technologies provide new and better ways of working, you must review and evolve your business processes to ensure you are making the right changes and are getting the most value from your effort.
Optimize Your Processes
Before you implement technological improvements, make sure your existing business processes are optimized for your organization. Through Business Process Management (BPM), core business processes can be redesigned to achieve significant improvements in productivity. When assessing your processes, look for the following:
- Undefined processes
- Bottlenecks
- Manual processes with numerous handoffs
- Complex workflows with lack of monitoring and data
Look for any disconnects between processes, technology and business outcomes to identify where you can be more efficient. Implement, execute and test solutions with a continuous improvement mindset. Try not to solve everything at once; it is easier to change processes incrementally in an Agile way breaking things down into chunks.
Processes involve people so for changes to be successful, there must be buy-in. You can use incremental improvements to demonstrate the value to your team, then build on those small wins to get more buy-in as you continuously improve and optimize processes.
Use Automation to Streamline
As you make your processes more efficient, consider if there are ways to automate with technology and improve your operations even more. After optimizing your business process, you are better positioned to leverage Business Process Management Software (BPMS), like Salesforce, Pega and Appian, to automate manual tasks, approvals and procedures.
Why are these BPMS solutions so popular? By providing low code and no code platforms, they reduce the need for you to create custom applications and features. When you do need to build a custom feature, you can do it without coding. The automation of processes and streamlining of the development of solutions can save substantial time and resources and allow you to focus on delivering business value.
Turn Change Into Value
How do you ensure that your process improvements and investment in automation technology result in value added to you and your customers? Adequately prepare for transformation, identify gaps and utilize and instill best practices. Lean, Agile and Product Management principles can be used to define, optimize and successfully automate your business processes. Define the business processes up front and understand how they contribute to the core business.
Take a holistic view of your enterprise business capabilities to understand and document existing processes, then design and map system-ready future processes using best practice frameworks that allow you to scale BPM throughout your enterprise. Using the latest Lean, Agile thinking and Product Management approaches to BPM can help you deliver consistent value to customers and realize greater return on investment.
