How Business Process Management (BPM) can help you reach your operational goals
Better visibility, increased customer satisfaction, reduced risk and costs, reducing errors, and greater compliance and security – just five really good reasons to look at your business processes and evaluate them. Do you need to be taking a different approach?
Those five reasons are what Business Process Management (BPM) is about. It uses the power of workflow, approvals and alerts to ensure that team members across all departments are aligned and have the information they need to do their jobs well and ensure processes run consistently, efficiently time after time.
Ask yourself these questions:
1. Are you and your staff spending a lot of time on repetitive, manual tasks?
2. Could your time be better spent on core tasks and business growth?
3. Have manual errors cost you in time, money and loss of customers or customer satisfaction?
4. Is growth in your business hindered by the effort it takes to get the transactions processed?
5. Have you noticed a drop in efficiency and productivity?
If you've answered 'yes' to some or all of those questions, it's a good indication that your business processes need to be overhauled, updated and modernised. A BPM tool cuts down on the time and energy it takes to complete manual, repetitive processes.
The key here is one word: automation. Take invoice printing for example. You need to locate the invoice, populate it with the necessary values, print it out and then send it off. The implementation of a BPM tool will set up an automated process that does all of this at the click of a button and email it out.
If you think about your business processes, how many of them are similar? How much time could be saved by automating them and how much would it cut down on errors?
MYOB Greentree is a great example of a solution that integrates BPM and Workflow software. Think of a flowchart that documents a process. Behind the scenes, MYOB Greentree automates that flowchart and provides users with prompts to facilitate the process, making it faster, more streamlined and accurate.
When it comes to results, productivity gains are one of the most significant benefits you'll notice. If you and your staff aren't spending time on repetitive, manual tasks - or fixing errors they generate - you'll be investing your time more productively.
For example, an Endeavour client wanted to be able to email their customers to notify them of delivery. The email would contain the same details:
- The product type
- Delivery date and time
- Contact information
This used to be done manually using templates on a shared drive. The emails had to be edited to fit each individual customer, and the type of product that had been purchased. Implementing a BPM tool means that now, all they need to do is literally click one button. We configured MYOB Greentree so that it can identify the packing slip and product type, determines what type of delivery it is, and then populate the email template with the relevant information. The user has not had to anything aside from that one click. What this has meant for our client is major gains in terms of productivity and efficiency, and the elimination of errors around product type and delivery information.
This is also a good example of the flexibility of MYOB Greentree; we configured the BPM and workflow features to align with our client's individual business needs. As a BPM tool, MYOB Greentree is great straight out of the box, but the ability to configure the application means we can tailor it as needed. For example, you can maintain a certain level of user interaction - such as pop-up questions that need to be answered - or it can be configured to cut interaction down to the bare minimum.
Replacing manual, repetitive business process with an automated BPM solution is also how businesses are meeting the challenges of digital disruption. Paper-based systems are on the way out as digital technology continues to transform business processes. Increasingly, your own customers will expect to see automation in how your business is run.
What it comes down to is this: if you don't automate your business process with a BPM tool, you're missing out on a world of opportunity in terms of productivity and efficiency gains. It's the way of the future, and where digital transformation is taking us.
Keen to find out more about how MYOB Greentree's BPM features can transform your business processes? Drop us a line and we'll get a discussion started.
