In today’s business environment, holistic Business Process Management (BPM) has gained precedence over simple business process outsourcing. In the past, vendors were expected to deliver to metrics detailed in service level agreements. Today, clients expect a strong positive influence on business outcomes, improving operational efficiencies, creating superlative product and service experiences for the firm’s end customers and importantly, making a favourable impact on profit margins. The role of a BPM solution is to translate business opportunities into tangible solutions that lower costs or improve profitability.

Business transformation tends to be an overused euphemism for short-term gains that are the result of an improvement project. True transformation helps companies make decisions that affect business outcomes and imperatives. A Business Process Management solution such as FlowCentric offer a judicious mix of processes and technology that target holistic improvement and consequently, effect real transformation that can be measured in terms of business outcomes

The first and probably the most important advantage of a BPM solution is that it unifies the way the core businesses and business enabling functions run day-to-day operations and enables effective management at ground level or by the leadership. BPM is particularly relevant to companies that follow a global delivery model, enabling visibility to the efficiency of core processes by placing them on a single, intuitive platform by helping functional managers identify the strengths and weaknesses of existing processes.

Second, BPM solutions deliver significant productivity gains through the automation of routine and repeatable tasks through an intelligent workflow rules repository, a data store, a business rules engine and a processing engine. A well-programmed rules engine can sustainably handle simple and complex activities while streamlining operational processes for optimum productivity, quality and turnaround times. A robust BPM platform creates scalable, risk-mitigated automation schemes that enable a business to use the platform to manage changes in business scope or expansion of the current business.

Third, BPM solutions enable the metric-based monitoring and review of operational parameters as well as create measurable outcomes for business enabling functions. The monitoring of key operational metrics and their effect on high-level business metrics is made easier by the use of content management tools and collaboration systems that are compliant to several industry and financial standards such as SOX and SAS. BPM solutions also offer analytics and reporting services through standard or proprietary office reporting software.

Fourth, once deployed and adapted to the specific nuances of your business, a BPM platform is a powerful tool that can be used to identify improvement opportunities. While the automation capabilities of BPM software may offer some quick gains, the application of Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle can be strengthened by the use of the software’s integrated reporting, analysis and modelling modules.

Understanding the advantages and the capabilities of a Business Process Management solution can help you identify operational gaps that may be addressed by such a solution and help your business move from a metric-driven model to an outcome-driven model and improve efficiency and profitability.