The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Management Transformation

Business process management (BPM) practices are designed to help your organization optimize and execute core processes through analysis, standardization, and automation. Such capabilities can help your company scale, reduce costs, and boost performance. However, the changing digital landscape is forcing businesses to adapt quickly to ensure they’re not left behind the competition and ever-evolving market trends, making it necessary to take a different approach to BPM.

To truly maximize your BPM practices and optimize your operations alongside continuous change, your organization may need to undergo a transformation that will allow for more rapid operational efficiencies and process improvements that traditional BPM methods can’t support. The first step to achieving this goal is by allowing your infrastructure to communicate effectively across the entire business.

Ditch the Paper and Spreadsheets

Despite the availability of more efficient and productive tools, you may still rely on outdated platforms that will not support a successful digital transformation strategy. In fact, it’s not uncommon for even successful, established companies to utilize paper and spreadsheets for their data management needs. These methods make unified communication across an enterprise a laborious or even seemingly impossible exercise, especially if paper handouts are in play to communicate ideas across different departments, or even simply if core platforms do not talk to one another. 

So how can you achieve a more connected infrastructure to facilitate organization-wide communication? Your business should begin by analyzing its core systems and how they speak to one another. Determine:

• Are all of your core business processes enabled in the digital landscape?
• How do data get from one source to another? Are there APIs or automated workflows?
• Are there centralized platforms to enable data insights and cross-functional collaboration? Do these systems connect up to the cloud?

It’s critical that your team begins your transformation journey by establishing strong foundational platforms, such as an ERP, and connect those platforms through connections that enable interoperability and insight across the organization. This infrastructure will allow you to rely on foundational data models while you make iterative business process management changes throughout your digital transformation.

Iterate through Custom Solution Design

There are other ways your company can execute a successful digital transformation strategy—an initiative that requires changing your infrastructure and fostering agile development of custom applications. For example, low-code development platforms can simplify your IT systems management, while a front-end toolkit will enable full interoperability across all of your organization’s apps. 

Low-code environments are also ideal for custom solution design, which can enable your company to quickly launch new, business-critical applications without negatively impacting your team’s productivity and the apps’ overall usability. With low-code app development, your organization doesn’t require a robust development team. Instead, your business can take advantage of a visual integrated development environment (IDE) suitable for developers of varying skills.  

Custom solution design will empower your organization to cost-effectively develop applications at a faster rate than traditional programming, devote less time to quality assurance and quality control tasks, avoid the hassle of constantly refreshing code because low-code platforms are maintained by vendors, and unify your app lifecycle management. 

These benefits will contribute to quicker operational optimization that will allow your organization greater iteration as your digital landscape constantly shifts. 

Next Up: Cloud Services Architecture

The demand for cloud-based applications and the proliferation of the Internet of things (IoT) are both fueling the global serverless architecture industry, which is projected to increase from approximately $4.3 billion in 2018 to nearly $15 billion by 2023, according to a report by Research and Markets. During this timeframe, cloud-based deployments will experience the highest compound annual growth rate of any serverless vertical.

From a BPM-based lens, cloud computing can also serve a valuable purpose. Paired with a universal user experience (UX) that provides a consistent UI across applications and allows access to multiple systems and data sources, your company can tap into a cloud services architecture to take advantage of real-time predictive research dashboards that utilize artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and machine learning (ML) tools to unlock data-driven insights across your entire organization. 

Having such a capability is essential to succeeding in the Industrial IoT (IIoT) age, which is all about leveraging real-time analytics to accurately analyze data from connected sensors and machines. For businesses that depend on machinery for daily operations, having insight to detect equipment failures could be a welcome addition to any BPM analysis. Regardless of industry, the big data analytics that cloud services architecture unlocks will enable superior optimization capabilities — for teams that are equipped to collect and synthesize these insights, folding this process into their holistic digital transformation strategy. 

Get Started with a BPM Transformation

A successful business process management transformation isn’t an all-encompassing strategy; it requires specific steps that go beyond the ideation and creation phase of the journey. If your organization wants to explore a BPM transformation in more depth, BoomDTC, the digital transformation platform created by Linx-AS, can help. 

Regardless if your business is still maturing or is firmly situated on the Fortune 500, BoomDTC has helped companies across industries with their BPM transformations by replacing outdated processes with automated functionality and implementing connected infrastructures, resulting in reduced costs and optimized production. And, because of their firm belief in enabling continuous improvement, BoomDTC’s low-code solutions will promote optimization throughout your entire digital transformation.

Ready to start your BPM transformation? Contact BoomDTC today.