So your organisation is embarking on a digital transformation initiative, but what does it involve? Yes, you’re shifting away from paper based and manual processes toward digital solutions, but is that all it takes?
Digitally transforming your business doesn’t just mean taking your existing processes and putting them online, it represents a fundamental shift in the way you think, the way you operate. It means efficiency, connectivity, and innovation have to take centre stage.
With that in mind, it might be time to consider Business Process Management’s (BPM) impact on Digital Transformation.
What is Business Process Management?
We took a deep dive in to everything you need to know about BPM in a recent article, which you can read here.
But, in its simplest form, Business Process Management is about figuring out how a business does things; identifying regular activities, pinpointing how they could be improved, and making changes to optimise the repetitive processes. The ultimate goal is for businesses to become more efficient, more consistent, reduce costs, increase transparency and accountability, and provide a better experience of day-to-day work for employees.
What is Digital Transformation?
The term ‘digital transformation’ has become somewhat of a buzzword over the last few years, so to many of you the phrase may induce some sort of reflexive eye roll. However, we’d be remiss not to give a brief description, but instead of recycling the same definition everyone else will give you, here’s how our COO Max Kelleher defines digital transformation in his ebook:
“Digital transformation is a pursuit of efficiency through the removal/reduction or standardisation of human touch points and IT systems across an organisation – both within and across target business processes.
In simpler terms, it’s about making it easier for teams to confidently complete tasks – because the right information and materials are served up as and when needed, in the context of what someone is doing. They are not hidden away somewhere inaccessible, and individual team members are less likely to cause bottlenecks if they are otherwise engaged. In many routine cases, processes can be automated when everything can be reliably brought together in the right context to reach conclusions, complete tasks, and determine next actions”.
How are Business Process Management and Digital Transformation Connected?
Business process management plays a crucial role in enabling and supporting digital transformation initiatives across organisations. As companies look to digitally transform, BPM provides several key functions:
1. Driving Efficiency Through Process Improvement
One of the main goals of digital transformation is to increase efficiency, productivity, and agility across the organisation. BPM provides the methodology to analyse current business processes, identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and unnecessary tasks, and then redesign those processes to be streamlined for the digital age. With a focus on constant optimisation, BPM provides the roadmap for transforming legacy processes into digital, automated processes that improve speed, reduce costs, and enhance quality.
2. Supporting Adoption of New Technologies
Digital transformation inherently relies on the adoption of new technologies like cloud computing, AI, and advanced analytics. BPM helps to ensure effective integration and change management as these new technologies are embedded into business processes by design. BPM provides visibility into end-to-end processes to help identify the best areas and use cases to leverage new technologies for maximum impact on the business.
3. Enabling Greater Collaboration Across Functions
Digital transformation breaks down traditional company silos, encouraging greater collaboration and connectivity across teams, functions, and locations. BPM provides documentation of people, systems, data, and steps in processes that gives greater visibility across the organisation. This supports cross-functional collaboration and alignment that is critical for success.
4. Driving a Customer-Centric Culture
A major goal of digital transformation is using technology to provide seamless and personalised customer experiences across channels. BPM initiatives embed the customer into process design, mapping different customer journeys to identify pain points and areas for digitisation. This contributes to the cultural shift with the customer at the core rather than internal goals.
Without robust and mature Business Process Management, companies will struggle to successfully implement digital transformation initiatives. Attempting large-scale technology and process changes without a detailed understanding of current workflows, metrics, and bottlenecks creates misguided transformation efforts, insufficient governance, lack of standardisation, and poor adoption of new tools across the organisation.
By jumping straight into a digital overhaul without proper process documentation, analysis, and redesign, organisations implement one-off systems that increase complexity rather than unlock efficiency gains. In the end, overlooking Business Process Management before undergoing transformations grounded in emerging technologies leads to disjointed operations that fail to meet targets and never achieve the level of digital integration required to excel in the modern regulated business landscape.
Benefits of BPM Software for Digital Transformation
Now that we’ve looked at how Business Process Management and digital transformation are connected, the next step is to discover how to implement BPM to bolster the digital transformation of your organisation.
A software solution that specialises in Business Process Management and Business Process Automation can provide a number of benefits for companies undergoing a digital transformation initiative:
1. Comprehensive Visibility
BPM software gives comprehensive visibility into an organisation’s processes by mapping connections, sequencing workflows, documenting policies & procedures, and tracking metrics. These all aid transformational planning and insight into areas that need the most prioritisation.
2. Collaboration Across Departments
BPM Platforms like the CARA Platform put all your users and processes in one place, so you can create-cross functional workflows, author collaboratively with other departments, and notify and share results or findings with unlikely colleagues. CARA mirrors your real business, not the siloes your tools put you in. This enterprise connectivity drives digital transformation in your teams and their processes by centralising and controlling your data so that it can be re-used, shared, and protected correctly and consistently by any team working on the platform.
3. Increased Agility
Leading BPM platforms like the CARA Platform incorporate low/no-code to help teams rapidly configure and automate processes. This allows organisations to quickly respond to digital demands and pilot new workflows and processes for digital transformation initiatives.
4. Process Innovation
AI and Automation capabilities in BPM platforms help discover opportunities to continuously improve, redesign processes, and implement cutting-edge transformations grounded in real data.
5. Scalability
A BPM platform provides scalability to benefit digital transformation by improving process design, enforcing enterprise-wide standards, centralising visibility and governance, automating tasks and workflows, and facilitating rapid prototyping of innovations using cloud-based, low-code tools – streamlining execution as transformation initiatives scale across the organisation.
Learn more about the impact of Business Process Management on your digital transformation initiatives with the CARA Platform here.