Emerging BPM Trends and Challenges

In reference to Elias (2009), business processes are becoming increasingly convoluted and complex with the rapidly changing information technology and volatility in the global markets, as well as the developing opportunities from the many least expected areas. Thus, business process management or BPM, among other ways of making business units profit-driven, efficient and proactive, keeps to increasingly gain prevalence. In 2013, spending on BPM projects was around $130 billion, and by 2020, it is projected to grow to $233 billion (Mummigatti, 2006). The current research paper discusses the emerging trends and the likely challenges of BPM in enterprises.

What Is BPM?

BPM is a wide term that describes the automation of business activities to develop efficiencies, as regards to cost, time, and quality (Elias, 2009). BPM is the capacity to coordinate a process, automate its activities, optimize its resources, as well as control and define its outcome. BPM offers an end on view of the involved process and assigns it owners. It trails the process at every level, until completion and constantly optimizes the deployed resources. It creates reports on various output parameters, and improves and controls several parameters in measuring process efficiency. It is a philosophy to counter business hitches in a holistic manner. It bridges IT and business needs together and focuses on swiftness (Becker,  Kozyrev, Babkin, Taratukhin, & Aseeva, 2016).

 

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Why BPM?

All businesses need to evolve into a process-centric culture, in which all organization departments begin viewing processes as assets, and the way to influence them is to compete and perform better (Mummigatti, 2006). This begins with understanding what processes to follow, to automate them and to achieve essential transformation. The next transformation level (which is BPM) involves shrinking the processes, eliminating the involved resources, and optimizing and monitoring it on a constant basis (Elias, 2009).

What Drives the Changing Trends in BPM?

Elias (2009) explains that the today’s market place is composed of different characteristics. There is a need for a quicker speed to market, and there is a need for an increase in high knowledge-driven work. User collaboration is developing to higher levels, and the desire for an end-to-end process is increasing. Moreover, there are increasingly complex content types and processes’ styles, as well as requisite for advanced user visibility and interaction. Thus, improved BPM systems are needed to offset these complexities with new tools and features to condense the cost and time it takes to develop, design, and deploy solutions (Sundberg, 2013).

Trends in BPM

IT is daily evolving, as business and enterprises users advance and adopt new applications, tools, and use cases (Mummigatti, 2006). Accordingly, new breeds of BPM levels are emerging in the market, leveraging these paradigms, and new technologies. Some BPM firms are now providing the services, hosted or as SaaS (Software as a Service) (Sundberg, 2013, p. 798). Others are offering an integrated platform. For all these cases, the solution platforms are often driven by Human Centric processes (Elias, 2009) (i.e. workflows, which link people and data), speed and simplicity, as described below.

SaaS or Hosted

Various traditional BPM firms already permit execution of automated processes as a service or hosted (Sundberg, 2013). Also, some offer a subgroup of hosted BPM tools, such as, basic administration analysis and reporting tools. However, the newest solutions are advanced, hosting the entire BPM tools’ suite. One can then automate and implement a business process, as a service (Mummigatti, 2006). Moreover, the necessary tools to organize and deploy the process are also offered as a service. The service allows customers to gain many advantages, including simplicity and savings, the speed of deployment (50 to 90% quicker than a customary BPM), and major risk reduction due to shorter deployment times, and simpler project implementation. Furthermore, SaaS BPM transfers the expenditures of software license to operating budgets from capital budgets (Becker et al., 2016).

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The Integrated Platform

A central workflow, the integrated platform, which syndicates all the work-tools into a single portal, leads to substantial cost reduction and simplification of maintenance and installation process. Other additional advantages include less training, reduced license costs, and simpler upgrades. One integrated platform allows easy hosting of the BPM suite as a service, also making it common for the providers to entirely offer it, as hosted (Becker et al., 2016).

The Simplified BPM

The simplified BPM is another emerging BPM trend, which is focused on simplifying the process of deploying, modeling, configuring, and executing a solution. It achieves this through improving the usability and disregarding the essence to script or code. The simplified BPM is sold directly to the firms Business Units, the needy end users (Mummigatti, 2006). There is absolutely no coding in the simpler BPM; it instantly and automatically determines the relationships, stored procedures, database columns and tables, and meta-data among other necessary design information, needed to organize and position the solution. There is also a much faster deployment than the traditional BPM tools. Besides the alterations to the process being faster to complete, personnel training is easier and faster, and lower technical skills are required (Becker et al., 2016).

The Human-Centric BPM

Among the many emerging trends, the human-centric BPM focuses on connecting people to one another and to the data for generating reports. Typically, these processes are always manual and denote nearly from 70% to 80% of the organization’s daily workflows. Examples of human centric processes are Change Request Management, Expense Management, and Product / Project Lifecycle Management, etc. (Becker et al., 2016).

Challenges of BPM

Khan (2014) states that although BPM has received much attention recently, it is still burdened with numerous challenges. Firms must overcome them to attain better operational efficiency. The following are the challenges:

Support of Top Management

Despite the knowledge of its capability to considerably advance the business units’ operational competence, often BPM does not attain the top management’s full support. Rather than planning business processes, firm’s top management always focuses on some other errands, which yield a faster ROI (Khan, 2014).

Effective Strategies

For BPM to be effective, it is necessary to have a strong strategy. Otherwise, BPM will fail to deliver the needed ROI. Furthermore, a strong plan of BPM requires an effective communication strategy (Sundberg, 2013).

The IT Component

Notably, BPM usually depends on highly automated structures to streamline and simplify the firm’s management process. Significantly, however, firms should not deploy BPM without automation (Sundberg, 2013). If more business process aspects are automated, the human element will be overridden, which is vital for making thorough managerial decisions (Khan, 2014). Proper governance is also needed beyond processes’ automation for BPM optimization. It is a good idea to instate the BPM project manager (runs the project), and the process architect (for setting analytical techniques) (Khan, 2014).

Proper BPM Initiatives Management

An organization should have a devoted team to accomplish its BPM initiatives. The BPM knowledge and resources must be pooled, best practices and success stories must be upheld, and suitable BPM drills and training must be conveyed to all employees to ensure efficiency and effectiveness of the processes (Khan, 2014). Companies do not understand the aspect of Start small since initial BPM implementation must be low leveled. Notably, undertaking BPM is a continuous process and not an activity. BPM must be closely monitored; it should be started on a small scale to avoid organizational chaos. Small scale starts must be accompanied by pro-activeness.

In conclusion, business processes are highly pervasive (Becker et al., 2016). The topic of BPM is of great interest for most enterprise CIOs. Both large and small enterprises face the difficult challenges of bringing into line business and IT. Now, in the present business world, it is not a matter of “if” but “when” an enterprise will implement BPM. Due to competitive pressures, all enterprises must consider their central processes, as assets and control them through the BPM initiatives (Sundberg, 2013). The key to every success lies in identifying the inefficiencies in the core processes, establishing quick wins through high ROI, acquiring support and visibility from users, and imitating success (Becker et al., 2016).