As one observer noted, even large disasters like Chernobyl didn’t completely stem from a lack of documentation. This crisis caused so much damage because people failed to follow the planned and documented processes in time. While it’s important to document processes, no flowcharts or instructions will help businesses run more efficiently or overcome unexpected unusual obstacles if nobody follows them.
Thus, proper business management refers to more than simply planning and documenting business processes. It also includes enforcing, measuring, and improving these processes. Take a look at some business process management statistics to learn why it’s important, how well organizations are doing, and most important, the tools that can make effective business process management relatively simple and seamless.
How Business Process Management Protects Businesses
To illustrate failures in process management in an even simpler and more common way, you can consider a process failure to causing a car accident by running a stop sign. Licensed drivers should know the process for safely crossing an intersection. They even know they can suffer such consequences as getting a ticket or damaging their vehicle by violating the rules. Still, lapses happen with manual processes, and these are every day and everywhere occurrences. Meanwhile, it doesn’t really matter who caused the collision; everybody involved stands to lose time and money and maybe even suffer injuries.
In the future, maybe technology will find a way to stop cars at the intersection until the road has cleared, as happens with self-driving cars. While a business cannot drive itself, companies do have an opportunity to test and enforce their business processes in a rather remarkable and automated way with the right systems in place.
Business process management statistics from a survey by BPTrends paint a grim picture of the state of even documenting business process:
- Overall, 96% of businesses reported having at least some business processes documented, which of course, is a good first step.
- Only 11% of the respondents said they never documented processes, but only 23% reported frequently doing so.
- Only 2% of the companies surveyed said they always documented business processes.
For some specific examples, only 1% mentioned always documenting standard processes, the types of things they most often do. Slightly higher but still one-digit percentages of businesses always documented process improvement, the way they used data, manager training, or even major processes. In any case, this survey uncovered that businesses aren’t even consistently documenting processes, much less tracking or enforcing them. You can imagine how many more drivers would run stop signs if they thought the red hexagon was just a suggestion and not a rule.
Why Businesses Invest in Business Process Management
Red Hat helped sponsor a survey of the reasons companies choose to invest in improving their own process management. They highlighted these key findings:
- A desire to improve customer satisfaction: 42%
- A desire to improve efficiency and agility: 65%
- Companies with process change projects underway: 37%
Most of the survey respondents said their company focused on incremental process improvements and not a company-wide change in culture. In addition, they said the biggest obstacle they faced was simply selling the idea of documenting, tracking, and improving processes to senior managers. Some mentioned that they believed their leadership became confused because many departments had all presented their own projects, so this made it tough to get attention. This idea brings up the excellent point that business process management improvement could gain more traction with top-down leadership and as part of an enterprise-wide effort.
How Function4 & M-Files Makes Business Process Management a Seamless Part of Efficient Workflow
With Function4’s integration of the M-Files intelligent information management platform doesn’t just organize, maintain, and track your documents. It also automates the process of keeping your workflow on track and helps improve quality control through each step of the process. You won’t have to struggle with documents getting lost in the SPAM folder of the next responsible person’s email. Instead, that individual will get an alert that they need to attend to that document and one simple interface to use to perform their task. Such features as automatic approval notifications are already included in the system.
After that employee has completed their work, the process continues by moving on to the next person in the chain. Meanwhile, your valuable information and businesses processes will get protected by certified security, version control, recovery features, and an automated system. You can also integrate M-Files with such other enterprise-scale software as your CRM to make the transition seamless. M-Files also makes it easy to turn your workplace into a paperless office and to give employees remote access, so they can work where they need to.
Are you ready to imagine a better way of working as well as controlling business processes? Get started by scheduling a free demo or a free trial. Contact us today to tell us about your business processes, and we’ll show you how we help.
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