Forward-thinking business leaders are constantly looking out for ways to stay ahead of the competition and maintain their market foothold. One strategy that is invariably on the top of the list for every leader is Operational Excellence. The trend is evident—60% of respondents of the research report titled, ‘The Global State of Operational Excellence: Critical Challenges and Future Trends,’ shared Operational Excellence methodologies are growing in popularity.
Regardless of the size or vertical of your organisation, streamlining and optimising operations is now being considered as a must-have for its longevity and sustainability. That said, operational excellence is not a one-and-done initiative, it involves a holistic culture change where all the employees are empowered to meet the organisational goals in the most efficient and cost-effective way.
The key lies in constantly measuring and improving process efficiency. A Business Process Management (BPM) methodology proves instrumental here as it has the potential to set the right foundation for any operational excellence initiative. Check out 6 ways harnessing BPM can help organisations achieve operational excellence:
- Focus on the right processes: Process improvement is one of the key steps in achieving operational excellence. But how do you decide where to begin your operational efficiency journey? This is where BPM proves a game-changer. Providing you with important insights, such as efficiency, cost and time for each process, BPM points you to the processes that require urgent attention for improvement. You can also carry out root cause analysis to understand issues in the process and improvement opportunities. Eliminating these issues paves the way for operational excellence.
- Eliminate Process Delays: BPM proves valuable in optimising your processes by providing insights into non-value-added activities in the process. For instance, you get to understand if you are double-handling some tasks or doing repetitive tasks, which in turn are leading to inefficiencies in the process. Ironing out these bottlenecks and inefficiencies will help you improve execution time per activity and remove process delays. Constantly monitoring and improving these processes helps you push the envelope further in terms of operational efficiency.
- Tap into Process Automation: Automating lengthy, time-consuming, repetitive tasks goes a long way in increasing efficiency and productivity while improving accuracy. It also helps in improving employee satisfaction as they can now focus on innovation instead of spending their time executing monotonous activities. However, automating inefficient processes doesn’t deliver the desired result. BPM helps you remove bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the process. Now, when you apply automation to the streamlined process, the output is maximised. BPM helps you identify tasks that are structured to be automated in the process, such as labour-intensive tasks that lead to delays. Using these insights, you can effectively channel your automation strategy.
- Visibility and Transparency: A transparent and well-thought-out process is a must to avoid any communication conflicts. BPM enables end-to-end transparency in processes, which facilitates faster decision-making. With real-time visibility into the processes, stakeholders are always updated about their responsibilities, goals and deadlines. This leads to streamlined planning and execution of activities.
- Collaborate and Conquer: Highly-productive, collaborative teams are at the centre of any successful business. Especially, given today’s remote working environment, collaboration is vital to ensure team productivity and efficiency. With BPM, you empower stakeholders with a single version of the truth. A holistic and transparent view enables teams to work together on multiple projects. Employees gain the ability to track project progress and approve and share changes in real-time. This also increases employee satisfaction—as per the findings of a McKinsey study, technology that enables collaboration among employees is most valued among80% of executives. Streamlined collaboration ensures that employee efforts are aligned towards achieving organisational goals, helping the objective of achieving operational excellence.
- Measure Performance with KPIs: We have all heard that only what gets measured, gets managed. As KPIs analyse and measure the business performance, it’s crucial to clearly define and track them for achieving operational excellence. Using BPM, you can list KPIs for each process to ensure the process is performing as per the set requirement. Choosing a BPM tool with an inbuilt analytics engine that tracks KPIs and sends automated alerts to process owners in case of under-performance comes in extremely handy. This helps you ensure that a process is performing optimally at all times.
From powerful process modelling capabilities to an in-built analytical engine that automatically measures key process performance metrics and strong collaboration features, PRIME BPM includes best-in-class functionalities to help your organisation in its operational excellence objective. Click here to try PRIME BPM for Free to understand how its powerful functionalities can help you fast-track your operational excellence journey.