Last Updated on July 24, 2024 by Owen McGab Enaohwo
The success of any business depends on the ability to turn their goals into day-to-day life activities.
Creating goals and objectives is a part of strategic planning, but how to understand whether the strategies are efficient or effective in reaching them.
This is where business process management (BPM) comes in. It helps keep a check on the activities, collect data, automate repetitive tasks, and a lot of other things. But before deep diving into why exactly BPM is necessary, let’s understand the meaning of both BPM and strategic business planning.
What is business process management (BPM)?
Business process management (BPM) is a systematic approach to improving an organization’s processes. It involves analyzing, designing, implementing, monitoring, and optimizing processes to align with organizational goals. BPM aims to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and increase productivity.
What is strategic business planning?
Strategic business planning is a comprehensive process that organizations undertake to define their direction and make decisions on allocating resources to reach their destination. It involves setting long-term goals, analyzing internal and external factors that could affect the organization, developing action plans, and monitoring progress toward goals.
Roles of BPM for strategic business planning
Incorporating BPM into strategic business planning ensures that an organization’s processes are efficient, flexible, and aligned with its long-term goals.
It improves operational performance and the organization’s ability to achieve its strategic goals. Here are the reasons why you need BPM for strategic business planning:
- Improves understanding of current operations
Effective strategic business planning helps understand an organization’s current state. Business process management helps with this by achieving clarity.
It analyzes existing workflows and identifies areas of inefficiency, duplication of effort, and potential for improvement. This analysis provides valuable insights into the operational landscape, highlighting aspects that may interrupt the execution of strategic goals. It makes your planning stronger and more likely to succeed.
- Aligns processes with strategies
Strategic planning defines a business’s where and what, outlining future goals and objectives. However, converting these strategies into reality requires an action plan.
It is where BPM steps in, acting as a bridge between ambition and execution. Through process analysis, BPM identifies workflows that are necessary to achieve strategic objectives. BPM ensures that everyday operations directly contribute to achieving the company’s strategic vision.
- Enhances performance management
Strategic plans are like roadmaps, but how do you know that you’re on the right track? That’s where a BPM comes in. BPM helps in setting clear measurements aka key indicators.
These key indicators help you track how well your processes are working. It also helps you see if your daily tasks are helping you achieve your strategic goals. If something isn’t working as planned, BPM helps you identify areas for improvement, keeping you on the path to success.
- Improves efficiency
Business process management enhances operational efficiency by continuously analyzing and optimizing business processes.
It regularly reviews workflows and identifies all the gaps and inefficiencies. This way, by streamlining processes, BPM automates repetitive tasks and workflows increasing overall efficiency.
Resulting in employees completing tasks more quickly and focusing on higher-value activities, boosting overall productivity.
Improving operational efficiency through BPM directly supports the organization’s strategic goals.
- Enhances flexibility
By maintaining well-documented and clearly understood processes, BPM allows businesses to adapt quickly to new opportunities, threats, or changes.
This documentation ensures that everyone in the organization is aligned and aware of the processes, making it easier to implement changes without confusion or delay.
When there is a market shift towards some new trend, organizations with effective BPM can change their strategic plans accordingly and efficiently.
For example, if a new technology emerges, BPM can help integrate it into existing strategic business planning ensuring maximum benefits with minimal changes.
- Manages risk
Through BPM, organizations can systematically identify potential risks, assess their impact, and develop strategic plans to mitigate these risks effectively.
This proactive approach to risk management enables organizations to minimize the negative effects and grow their businesses.
Additionally, BPM ensures that business processes comply with relevant regulations and standards. By closely aligning processes with regulatory requirements, organizations reduce the risk of legal issues, fines, and reputational damage.
- Helps in data-driven decision-making
With business process management, you get extensive data on process performance. This includes metrics on efficiency, productivity, and error rates.
The data gained here is precious for strategic planning, allowing leaders to make data-driven decisions based on real-time information and trends.
Access to real-time data also makes a firm more flexible and speedy in responding. Managers can quickly assess the impact of new strategies or market changes to adjust their plans accordingly.
Furthermore, continuous monitoring and feedback provided by BPM ensure that processes remain efficient and aligned with strategic goals.
- Improves customer satisfaction
Effective BPM leads to well-managed processes, which improves the quality of products and services. This ultimately results in fewer errors, speedy delivery, and higher consistency in the output.
It improves the overall experience of customers, as they receive high-quality products or services that meet their expectations.
Happy customers are more likely to become repeat buyers and loyal clients for the brand. They provide positive reviews and word-of-mouth referrals, which can attract new customers and drive sales growth.
- Manages cost
With thorough analysis, BPM identifies areas where resources are being wasted, including unnecessary steps or outdated practices. Addressing these problems helps streamline processes, making them less costly.
Additionally, it also recognizes repetitive tasks that do not add value. Automating these tasks optimizes resource usage, ensuring that every action contributes to overall efficiency.
Besides, this reduction in waste leads to significant cost savings, as streamlined processes require fewer resources, less time, and less effort to achieve the same or better outcomes.
Conclusion
So, that’s it for today! But after seeing all these reasons, the importance of business process management can’t be ignored while creating a strategic business plan.
But are you confused about how to actually create BPM? Here, give a try to SweetProcess for creating various processes and procedures for documentation, implementing strategies, new member onboarding, and more.
Good luck with strategic planning!
Author’s Bio
Vinay Kevadiya
Vinay Kevadiya is the founder and CEO of Upmetrics, the #1 business planning software.
His ultimate goal with Upmetrics is to revolutionize how entrepreneurs create, manage, and execute their business plans.
He enjoys sharing his insights on business planning and other relevant topics through his articles and blog posts.