Your organization is brimming with processes that occur every day. Some of these processes work well and others are plagued by inefficiency. Some are quick and are accomplished without thought, others are long term and involve many people, and may be critical to your business outcomes. If you are investigating a BPM (Business Process Management) solution, with a view of improving these outcomes and achieving these goals, it is advisable to identify which processes you need to improve.
But how do you effectively identify such processes? Here are some practical guidelines:
1. What are Your Company’s Goals?
2. Get Your Ear on the Pavement
3. Put Your Finger on the Problem
4. Set Your Sights on the Potential
Some possible examples of areas, which, if improved, can mean a step change for your business:
- Customer self-service
- Better collaboration between teams
- Increased management visibility
- Ability to modify processes quickly in order to better compete
- Mobility – facilitating location-independence by putting processes on mobile devices, especially for field workers
- Integration – integrating data, processes and people with disconnected yet critical systems, such as CRM/ERP.
Each of these areas may hold the key to transforming your business. It’s your job to zero in on a small handful of processes that, if improved radically, could hold this potential.
5. Caution! Watch Out for Value-less Processes
6. Use Your Head
7. Be Practical, Start Small
8. Think Beyond Just Workflow
9. Walk through the Solution
10. Draw Up a Plan, Focus on ROI
Now you know what needs to be done, it’s time to get management to sign off. Create a business process management plan which outlines the goals, processes, and solutions which you propose. Make sure to include estimated ROI for each step, and a timeline. Bring this plan to your management and get their approval.
Once that is done, you begin your next step in the journey – selecting a BPM solution which will bring your plan to fruition. That is the subject of this post. Good luck!
N.B.: This blog post first appeared in an extended version on PNMsoft.com.
Follow
