While BPM has been around for decades, a revolution is currently brewing in space. Traditionally considered a technology only for large businesses with huge budgets, the technology is now emerging as a necessity for organisations of all sizes. Riding on the back of digital transformation and the emerging wave of low-code, no-code software, BPM is witnessing some definite trends.
We look at 5 major trends that will dominate and shape the future of BPM
1. Analytics takes centerstage
For the longest time, mapping and documenting processes has been the main goal linked with the BPM technology. However, in the last few years, the ability to analyse the processes and use this data to improve them has been a trend that is catching up. Powerful Business Process Analytics helps organisations with data to target their improvement and transformation efforts.
Insights such as process efficiency, time, cost and value come in handy and helps business leaders in making the right decisions. In fact, it takes the potential of BPM to another level as insights can be used to identify process bottlenecks and non-value-adding tasks, such as rework, unnecessary approvals and double entries. Eliminating these and making necessary adjustments helps in easily streamlining the processes. Since the benefits of process insights are hard to ignore, the trend of analytics will continue to rise.
2. Democratization of BPM
Traditionally, BPM has been driven by BPM experts and professionals with business remaining at the side. Also, BPM projects have conventionally been of interest to large organisations, given the IT complexity, huge costs of BPM solutions and resource requirements for ongoing implementation management. However, radical changes are happening.
BPM tools are now available that focus on empowering business users and process participants to actively participate in BPM projects. The emphasis is on making BPM accessible by providing access to automatic process-related insights, simplified mapping functionalities and collaborative features. As the revolution continues to strengthen where corporate data is created and used by everyone in the organisation, the trend is going to gain further traction.
3. Intelligent Process Modelling
With the advancement in BPM technology and sophisticated tools, process maps are no longer just boxes and lines. Powerful BPM tools today help organisations gain a 360-degree understanding of their processes with the ability to record business rules, KPIs, text descriptions, roles and documents. With organisations looking at process improvement to gain operational efficiency, improve compliance, enhance customer satisfaction and boost profitability, intelligent process modelling capabilities are becoming sought-after to power the improvement efforts.
4. Increased thrust on Automation advancing Low-Code Platforms
As organisations are looking to gain a competitive advantage in the post-COVID world, automation is on the top of their list. Manual, repetitive processes are increasingly being automated in organisations across industries to increase efficiency and reduce the occurrence of errors. This is leading to an increase in demand for low-code systems, which enable organisations to automate within a matter of weeks as compared to months. These tools have pre-designed templates, and user-friendly drag-and-drop functionalities to help organisations achieve automation without the reliance on the IT team to write codes. The demand for low-code platforms will surge further—by 2024, Gartner predicts that 75% of major companies will be employing at least four low-code development tools rather than just one.
5. Greater Collaboration
With remote and hybrid work on the rise post-pandemic, demand for greater collaboration has emerged. This holds true for functionalities in BPM solutions too. Features like process-related alerts; the ability to collaboratively define improvements; secure, user-restricted document sharing; and a centralised repository with access control are functionalities high in demand in BPM tools. These collaboration functionalities substantially reduce the number of emails and communication and ensure that all employees have updated processes at hand even when they are working remotely. With remote work here to stay, collaborative features will see a further spike.
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