Business process modeling (BPM), also called process modeling, is the analytical illustration or representation of an organization’s activity or set of activities that will help the organization achieve its goals.
Businesses use business process modeling to map out their current processes, create a baseline for process improvements, and design future processes with those improvements incorporated. Business process modeling is typically performed by business analysts or managers seeking to improve process efficiency and quality, and reduce waste.
Having read the above, you may want to think business process modeling is useless. But it’s not. It is one strategy every business–including yours–should adopt. Here are 10 reasons why business process modeling is important to your business.
Top 10 Reasons Why Business Process Modeling Is Important
1. BPM improves process communication
Since business modeling is a way of bringing together the various processes within a business, it creates a communication link between all the individuals handling each process. Even when each process is handled by a team of brilliant minds, their efforts won’t help a business if there’s no effective communication link with handlers of the business’s other processes.
2. BPM increases control and consistency
One of the keys to the success of a business is the consistent application of well-designed processes and rules. And BPM is a good way to make this happen because it seeks to analyze a business’s processes, uphold and focus more on what’s working and discard what’s not. When a business delivers good result all the time; that is consistency.
3. BPM aligns operations with business strategy
For a business to implement a business strategy or a new business model, some changes will be required in the operations and in how people perform their respective roles. The only way to effect such changes without distorting the business’s traditional arrangement is to do BPM. This will help link organizational strategy to well-defined business processes.
4. BPM improves operational efficiencies
Achieving the best possible results with available resources is the goal of every manager in today’s business environment. So, there’s no room for wastage and inefficiencies. And this is why business managers and analysts use BPM to ensure that their processes run effectively and that inefficiencies and wastage are cut out.
5. BPM helps businesses gain competitive advantage
When a business invests time and effort into documenting, simulating, and improving its business processes by way of BPM, it gains a significant competitive advantage. Many businesses have become successful not because they had better ideas or better business models, but because they invested significantly in BPM to constantly refine and improve their processes.
6. BPM helps to elucidate difficult processes
Some concepts are difficult to express with just written words or verbal communication. For example, in a complex business that comprises nested processes and sub-processes or branching decisions with different outputs, words may not describe the process perfectly. Since BPM is based on pictorial representations of a business’s processes, it simplifies the task of describing how a business operates.
7. BPM facilitates automation
Businesses are turning towards automation for better results. BPM makes automation easy by helping businesses generate real working systems. It also helps business owners figure out repeatable tasks that can be automated.
8. BPM helps preserve knowledge and corporate memory
A successful business can replicate its successes over the years only when details of how it achieved the successes are kept or saved. BPM helps businesses preserve knowledge and corporate memory by enabling quick and easy understand of the systems within a business by members of all teams working on different processes. It also helps new team members familiarize and get up to speed quickly.
9. BPM saves time and money
BPM helps businesses figure out parts of their existing information and knowledge that can be applied in new projects, thereby helping them save money and time.
10. BPM helps in managing complexity
BPM helps businesses to manage complex systems and processes. It helps them view their systems from multiple angles and helps them discover causes and effects of using model traceability. BPM also helps to increase business understanding through visual analysis. And it helps to discover errors and alternatives earlier in the system life cycle.
Bottom line
Having understood the importance of business process modeling, you should consider adopting this strategy for your business. However, you must bear in mind that, in order to get the desired results from BPM, you need to use the right tool. This could be a text-based document, a drawing tool, or a business modeling tool, depending on the processes your business entails.
