Many organisations embark on Business Process Management (BPM) initiatives but often fall short of achieving the desired outcomes. A common mistake is treating BPM as a standalone strategy. For BPM to be truly effective, it must be aligned with the organisation’s overarching strategy and corporate goals. This alignment not only drives sustainable growth and ROI but also ensures continued support from the executive team.
By integrating BPM with corporate objectives, businesses can optimise operations while advancing their long-term vision. This approach ensures that process improvements contribute directly to key performance indicators (KPIs), fostering a culture of continuous improvement. When BPM is viewed as a strategic asset rather than a tactical tool, it becomes a powerful driver of innovation, cost reduction, and competitive advantage. A well-aligned BPM strategy transforms process optimisation from a departmental focus into a company-wide engine for growth and market leadership.
In this blog, we’ll explore how to align BPM with corporate goals to maximise its impact.
Ensuring BPM Alignment with Corporate Goals
Here’s a step-by-step guide organisations need to follow to align BPM with corporate goals:
Understanding Corporate Objectives
To effectively align Business Process Management (BPM) with corporate goals, the first step is gaining a deep understanding of your organisation’s overarching objectives. Engaging with leadership and key stakeholders is essential to identify the company’s vision and long-term aspirations. This insight provides the foundation for aligning your BPM efforts with strategic priorities, ensuring every process improvement contributes to the broader business agenda. Once corporate objectives are clearly understood, BPM can be crafted as a powerful tool to support these goals.
Prioritise Goals
Not all corporate goals will have the same level of urgency or impact on your organisation’s success. It’s important to prioritise those that require immediate attention and have the most significant influence on the company’s performance. For example, if improving operational efficiency is critical to maintaining competitive advantage, then BPM initiatives should focus on streamlining internal workflows and reducing process bottlenecks. Prioritisation ensures that BPM efforts are focused on areas that will drive the most value for the business.
Establish BPM Objectives Linked to Corporate Strategy
Once you have clarity into corporate objectives, set BPM strategy to directly contribute to achieving corporate goals. These objectives should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). For instance, if a corporate goal is to enhance customer experience, a BPM objective could be identifying processes where customer service is delayed and hampered and prioritising those processes. You can then identify the possible inefficiencies or identify manual tasks that can be automated. Not all processes will have the same strategic value. Hence, the focus needs to be on high-frequency, high-impact, high-pain processes. To measure success, link BPM objectives to relevant KPIs, such as turnaround time, customer satisfaction scores etc.
How to Implement the BPM Strategy
Implementing a BPM strategy that aligns with corporate goals requires a structured approach:
Map Out Current Processes
With the high-priority processes linked with corporate goals identified, it’s time to map out those processes. Process maps need to be comprehensive, not only including the process steps but also capturing details, such as the RACI matrix, business rules, procedures, roles, KPIs etc., to better understand the issues in the process. It’s also beneficial to use BPMN 2.0, a worldwide recognised standard for process mapping to ensure accurate and standardised process maps across departments.
Get more information on what level you should map your business processes, watch this video: https://youtu.be/6RbN1zmcf70
Analysing Current Processes
Once the high-priority current processes are mapped, the next step is a detailed analysis. This involves evaluating each process to identify pain points, bottlenecks, and non-value-adding activities. Key metrics such as process cycle time, cost, error rates, and resource utilisation should be analysed to determine which processes are underperforming. The analysis would also help you to carry out targeted improvements.
Improving Processes
Based on the analysis, redesign workflows to eliminate inefficiencies and align them more closely with corporate goals. This may involve automating manual tasks, removing redundant steps, or reassigning resources to optimise performance. Engaging with stakeholders from different departments ensures that the redesigned processes are realistic, sustainable, and meet the needs of the entire organisation.
Adhering to New Processes
Implementing new processes is only as successful as the staff adhering to them. This step involves establishing governance structures to ensure that the improved processes are followed consistently. Clear documentation updated standard operating procedures (SOPs), and training programs are essential to ensure that employees understand the changes and their roles within the new workflows. Setting up a process owner or team to oversee adherence and address any issues is crucial for long-term success. Additionally, change management strategies should be employed to help staff adapt to the new processes smoothly and with minimal disruption.
Continuous Monitoring
Managing processes is not a one-time initiative, it is an ongoing effort. Use real-time data and key performance indicators (KPIs) to track process performance and identify areas that need further refinement. Regular process audits and feedback from teams can provide insights into whether the changes are effective or if further adjustments are required. Additionally, as corporate goals evolve, BPM strategies should be flexible enough to adapt and ensure alignment with new business objectives. BPM software like PRIME BPM allow suggestions to be added directly against the process.
Choosing the Right BPM software to meet Corporate Goals
Understand your infrastructure
Before you start looking for the right-fit BPM software, take a good, hard look at your current IT setup. What systems are you running? How do they talk to each other? Are there any stubborn legacy systems that refuse to play nice with others?
Understanding your current infrastructure is crucial. You need a BPM solution that will integrate seamlessly with your existing systems. Otherwise, you might end up with a fancy new tool that can’t access half your data.
Consider Scalability
Your BPM software might look perfect for your needs right now. But what about next year? Or in five years?
When evaluating BPM tools, consider
- How fast is your company growing?
- Are you planning to expand into new markets?
- Would you need to handle more complex processes in the future?
You want a solution that can grow with you. Look for scalability in terms of users, process complexity, and integration capabilities.
Evaluate Support and Community
Implementing BPM software isn’t a “set it and forget it” kind of deal. You’ll need ongoing support, updates, and possibly customisations.
When assessing vendors, apart from features, assess their support offerings:
- How responsive is their customer service?
- Do they offer comprehensive training?
- Is there an active user community where you can share tips and tricks?
Software like PRIME BPM provides comprehensive training programs, has a dedicated customer success manager and offers BPM communities to help connect with peers working on similar projects.
Run a Pilot
Choose a couple of key processes in your organisation and run them through your shortlisted BPM tools. This will give you invaluable insights into:
- How user-friendly the software really is
- How well it integrates with your existing systems.
When looking for BPM software, PRIME BPM is definitely worth considering. Advanced in-built features like one-click process prioritisation help you easily understand which processes are a priority and require urgent attention. By understanding your corporate goals, you can easily pick the right processes to map and analyse for maximum impact.
PRIME BPM also comes packed with drag-and-drop functionalities and in-built BPMN 2.0 to quickly and accurately create standardised process maps, as well as an advanced in-built analytics engine to carry out analytics. Interested in experiencing the functionalities first-hand? Take a 15-day free trial.