How can BPM benefit your financial service business?
What is business process management and how does it affect financial service sectors.
The business world grows increasingly competitive every day. Between startups with trendy apps and new marketing tools launching all the time, financial institutions and businesses in other industries must regularly update their processes and become more agile, save money, and improve the customer experience. One way that businesses have begun to do this is through business process management.
BPM – business process management – is defined as “a way to improve business processes from end to end by analyzing it, modeling how it works in different scenarios, executing improvements, monitoring the improved process and continually optimizing it.” While business process improvement is not a software or program, it is a holistic and ongoing way to make sure the processes you have in place at all levels of your organization are the most efficient and best way to serve your company, your employees, and your customers.
Business Process Management Benefits
There are several benefits from employing a full-scale way to analyze the effectiveness of your day to day operations and the processes that drive your business activity.
- Greater efficiency
- Easier to implement successful task automation
- Greater staff productivity
- Easier, faster implementation of responses to both challenges and opportunities
Successful BPM will usually include the following steps:
- Focusing on outcomes rather than tasks
- Understanding how you need to correct or improve tasks before automating
- Assigning internal ownership to processes and improvements so that improvement is ongoing and not one-time
- Standardizing processes across the organization for better understanding, bettering reporting, and reduced errors and risk
- Focusing on improving existing processes, rather than building out new ones or aiming for “perfect processes” to save time, money, and efficiency
Business Process Modeling Tools
There are several models for BPM that businesses can choose to follow, the two most popular being Six Sigma and Lean. These methodologies help businesses continue to analyze and modify their processes continually as a natural part of business operations.
Six Sigma: This is an approach to data-driven management that seeks to improve quality “by measuring how many defects there are in a process and systematically eliminating them until there are as close to zero defects as possible.” This process was first developed in 1984 by a Motorola engineer who helped to discover and eliminate parts of their process that were causing product defects. Many industries have adopted this system of business process management and grown the meaning of the word “defect” to mean any insufficiency that prevents a business from meeting customer needs.
Lean: This is an approach based on the idea of continuously improving an organization through small, incremental changes that can lead to better efficiency and quality. Over the long-term, lean management seeks to reduce or eliminate waste, whether it’s time, effort, or money, by discovering all steps of business processes and removing any that don’t create value.
Many organizations who are serious about BPM will often support certain employees or members of management becoming certified in one of these – or another – BPM methodology.
Does your business use BPM? Do you find that it has helped to improve your processes or increase your organizational efficiency?