What’s BPM?
BPM is a discipline of improving a process within a business by analysing all aspects of the core businesses. This involves identifying areas of improvement to create a leaner and efficient business by implementing proven frameworks and ultimately, technology.
Today, automation is the craze within BPM and rightfully so as it focusses on cost reduction, productivity and reliability. Gartner found that employees as a collective spend 520 hours a year on repetitive tasks that can be easily automated. That’s approximately 2 whole work months spent on tasks that can be made redundant; that’s 2 months’ worth of salaries that can be either reduced or re-allocated to other budgets.
Containing costs using automation becomes easy when you have a prebuilt operational framework which helps you along the way. Primary goals of a business process improvement automation include:
- Reducing process completion rate/time
- Removing wasteful steps
- Improving work quality
- Reducing friction
- Collecting data to further improve processes
So, what’s an example of automation?
A very basic example of redesigning a process/activity with automation can include; customer support. Customers require support 24/7 however most businesses aren’t able to provide this service – enter chatbots. Chatbots are a program which are designed with artificial intelligence to take on the roll of a person and help with queries in a conversational manner. They can be programmed with prebuilt answers, natural-language-processing and machine learning capabilities which can generate answers based on your questions in real time. So, by the implementation of a chatbot working in a HR capacity, you can remove the use of a call centre or dedicated employees answering queries by customers, effectively improving the bottom line.
How do you identify and implement automation?
1. List out all processes within your organization which you think can be improved. Processes that have a lot of paper filing, excel worksheets and people involved are usually great to start off with as they can reduce a huge chunk of wasteful steps, increase accuracy and reduce completion times.
2. Understand why that process is being undertaken and redefine the outcome/result.
3. Involve a BPM specialist
a. Either a technology consulting company (Satellight)
b. Freelancers
4. Implement new changes in organisation
5. Enjoy your new and improved bottom line
Author: Adam AbuSohaib
