How to Successfully Implement a BPM System

Business management software tools are rising in popularity due to the ease in which they carry out their prime objective to automate the manual processes that waste your employees’ time.

And yet, many organizations face issues when it comes to deploying a business management system. That’s understandable given that a BPM changes the way a lot of the essential processes work within an organization.

So, how can you best implement business management software into your company’s pre-existing working processes? Here’s a quick step-by-step:

1. Model the working process of your employees

The very first thing you must do is map the way your employees currently work. Not the way you’d want them to work or the way you expect a business management system to help them work but the way they work right now.

This is crucial as it will help you identify a proper benchmark for how people complete a certain task. With that, you can then model the type of workflow you’d wish to implement with the help of a BPM.

2. Structure the undocumented data of your company’s workflow

Before you do anything else with your business management software you should first document as many of the undocumented tasks and work processes that take place in your company every day. This includes things such as emails, chats, phone calls, face-to-face communication, and other time-consuming tasks that are difficult to record and keep track of.

The purpose of this isn’t to keep a close eye on your employees but simply to decide which of these tasks can be automated, outsourced, or improved with software. Not all of them need to be changed and the ones you decide to change will vary from company to company. But before you start tweaking the working process you must first examine all its details.

3. Start small

Good BPM software can help you do a lot of things – process analysis, modeling, design, performance management, process changes and transformation, and more. This can be very overwhelming for any company which is why most find it difficult to deploy a BPM at first.

The solution?

Start small. The first tasks you change in your company’s workflow should be low-risk, internal, and easily visible projects. It can be tempting to start optimizing the critical processes first – that’s what you got the business management system for in the first place. However, adjusting these critical processes first could be risky and actually result in decreased quality and efficiency of workflow.

At the same time, the process changes you implement shouldn’t be completely inconsequential either. You want to be able to show real, tangible results of the BPM implementation right away or you’ll risk people misunderstanding and undervaluing its purpose.

So, pick a few processes that are both simple and visible, as well as relatively significant, and adjust those first.

4. Work your way up

Once you’ve properly identified the processes that need to be changed and you’ve tested the BPM on several low-risk changes, start implementing the bigger improvements one after the other. Segmenting the changes will help you manage them more easily but once things start flowing you can speed them up.