Business process management consulting services have surfaced as a primary facilitator of organizational agility and operational excellence. Business process management consulting firms identify the strategic operations that drive business processes to align business objectives with value driven process outcomes and access value opportunities within the workflow.
Business process management (BPM) consulting companies work with businesses and help them streamline their operations to achieve operational excellence by combining process analysis, digital assets and industry know-how. BPM consulting firms support businesses through transformation and operational steering in fluid market conditions and can show measurable ROI through process modeling, process monitoring, and process improvement.
Whether the business process management consulting firm is overseeing the implementation of a digital business process workflow or reengineering legacy business systems, hiring the right BPM consultant ensures the new or modified digital business process will be more effective and achieve better efficiency, faster timeliness, compliance, and increased satisfaction among customers. BPM consulting can aid any organization in any industry from modernizing legacy systems to realize the value of as system that leverages digital, to go from a startup to scale. BPM consulting is no longer a ‘one and done’ project for organizations; it is part of the backbone process functionality necessary for business processes.
This article will describe the benefits organizations realize from the uses of business process management consultants, how BPM business transformation is supported by BPMS business process management systems (BPM), and purposefully discuss how IBM BPM and Oracle BPM provides business transformation alignment to operational excellence.
1. Strategic Process Optimization
BPM consultants perform comprehensive assessments of the existing workflows and map them to the overall business objectives. They identify bottlenecks, redundancies, and other wastes and present clear roadmaps for achieving efficiency.
BPR consulting services (Business Process Re Engineering) and BPM consulting embark on a radical redesign wherever required and is great if the organization is looking to redesign the core functions of operations, or enhance customer experience, for example. BPM consultants assist organizations by eliminating manual touchpoints while enhancing automation, reducing operational costs and turnaround time.
Furthermore, whether the process is a finance process impacted by legacy systems or a sales cycle hindered by unstructured approvals, BPM consultants have the objectivity and expertise and can include in the assessment process the simplification of the existing process in order to modernize it. Their approach is not simply related to tools, rather it is about change management, engaging employees, and having defined measurable KPIs.
Modern enterprises are now using these organizations whether they want to scale their processes, or simply enter a new market because they have been able to identify that legacy processes cannot scale the way within these organizations can under BPM process optimization frameworks. Process optimization ensures an organization develops a continuum of agility that provides for resilience and improvement at the same time supporting better cross-functional collaboration.
2. Accelerated Digital Transformation
BPM consultants serve as transformation accelerators and help organizations modernize their internal workflows utilizing enterprise tools like IBM BPM and Oracle BPM.
BPM consulting provides assurance that the digitization effort ends up looking like the actual needs of the organization, not “the latest and greatest technology to implement.” Consultants bring industry standards, best practices, and will customize the implementation strategy based on the organization’s digital maturity. Oracle BPM provides organizations the ability to develop responsive, agile applications to automate and improve [key] processes. IBM BPM equally provides a solid foundation for organizations to automate workflows across the enterprise and achieve scalability.
By setting the expectations of which processes need to be automated, processes that may need to be retired or replaced, and how new systems will fit into the organization’s IT architecture BPM consultants can develop a roadmap that clearly lays out sustainable transformation. By engaging with a BPM consultant to facilitate the digitization transformation, organizations will reduce the risk of implementation, decrease time-to-value, and improve digital adoption across functions and departments.
Whether discussing cloud enabled integrations allowing database organizations to collaborate with mobile access, or developing a single view of the customer, a BPM consultant will help organizations develop technology as a service to strategy not the other way around. For enterprises looking to digitize and future proof the organization’s operations, BPM Consulting will act as an essential partner in a successful digital transformation.
3. Enhanced Technology Integration
BPM Consultants are critical to connecting disjointed applications and supporting data flow and cross-process orchestration. They have robust platforms such as IBM BPMS and Oracle BPM to simultaneously deliver business outcomes while satisfying IT needs
A BPMS business process management system can be described as the “underpinning” to align disparate enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, HRMS, etc.) as integrated workflow tasks. BPM consultants build the scalable, manageable, and the secure integrations of BPM systems. This can be connecting a legacy application/server to a cloud service or exchanging multiple systems of data. This helps product knowledge to spread across siloed IT functions.
For example, IBM BPMS provides some level of customizable, as a choice of configurable/parameterization capabilities of the platform for dynamic, rule-based processing and real-time transaction visibility, whereas Oracle BPM automates processes from humans that introduce uncontrolled risk. BPM consultants athletic equating these models for automation but as adaptable intelligent systems that will ever-evolve for the business engagements.
4. Compliance, Governance & Risk Reduction
Modern organizations, large and small, have compliance and risk as paramount business objectives. BPM Consulting services can provide the necessary evidence to ascertain organizations operate legally while maintaining operational integrity. BPM Consultants establish governance models that hold people accountable, require compliance personnel to apply policy, and remain able to provide evidentiary documentation – if required by a governing body i.e., audit.
Through platforms such as BPMS business process management systems, BPM consultants are able to automate compliance-related activities associated with approval hierarchies, role-based access, and auditable transaction logs. Furthermore, automating the related activities mitigates the chance of human error and provides organizations with the transaction history needed for later auditing and forensics.
When we think of compliance and risk, it is easy just to think of banking, finance, or even medical compliance; however, many industries would benefit from automated governance. For example, a BPM Consultant may develop business process workflows to automatically flag high-risk transactions (a bank approval) or route legal contracts through a sequence of review paths based on the implications of compliance. Either way, these channels provide an automated method for governance since they are not reliant on the ability to remem-ber tasks. Still, it ultimately places the ready for review contract in the same location and reduces hours for employees.
Risk exposure can be mitigated as well. The latest and greatest tools include real-time monitoring and alert generation for abnormal workflows. I.e., an IBM BPMS has built-in advanced controls to help companies recognize before violations turn into major issues.
5. Continuous Improvement Culture
BPM consulting promotes continuous improvement towards a culture where feedback loops, iterative testing and performance reviews are common practice. Similarly, BPM consulting services can enhance those efficiencies from the ground up with an effective workflow redesign while BPR consulting services would provide long-term efficiencies.
It’s our belief that BPM consulting firms create enhanced responsiveness in organizations by promoting transparency and enabling agile decision making through the integration of business process audits, employee suggestions and customer feedback in the BPM lifecycle. This enables innovation at all levels in the organization from employees to executives.
It’s important to point out that BPM consultants are able to enable process testing through process simulation to give stakeholders an opportunity to test changes before rolling out changes in a live environment. Simulation limits risk and improves confidence to innovate, while encouraging experimentation which is a key element in continuous improvement.
Solutions like Oracle BPM and IBM BPM help promote this pattern of behaviour by providing version control, collaboration and means of real time adjustments in live processes.
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Author Bio
Rupal Agarwal
Chief Strategy Officer
Dr. Rupal’s “Everything is possible” attitude helps achieve the impossible. Dr. Rupal Agarwal has worked with 300+ companies from various sectors, since 2012, to custom-build SOPs, push their limits and improve performance efficiency. Rupal & her team have remarkable success stories of helping companies scale 10X with business process standardization.