BPM and Strategic Planning: How to Drive Business Success
Organizations are under constant pressure to innovate, streamline operations, and impress their customers (and shareholders). To achieve these cross-functional goals, many have turned to business process management (BPM). An integrated BPM strategy, coupled with organizational strategic planning, serves as a powerful accelerator and guide toward enduring business success.
But how can an organization align BPM efforts with its larger strategic goals and objectives? The answer lies in fundamentally understanding the intimate relationship between BPM and strategic planning.
Understanding BPM and Strategic Planning
BPM, at its core, enables businesses to visualize, analyze, and improve upon their current processes. Through modeling, automation, measurement, and optimization of business activities, BPM drives efficiency, flexibility and can dramatically enhance a business’s performance.
Strategic planning, on the other hand, provides the direction for a business. It establishes the long-term goals, the steps necessary to achieve those goals and the resources required. In other words, strategic planning charts the course, and BPM ensures that the journey is as smooth and advantageous as possible.
How to Align BPM with Strategic Goals
- Define Vision and Values: Everything in an organization should align with its vision and values. This includes BPM. By aligning BPM initiatives with organizational values and vision, each process improvement will be a step toward realizing the identified vision.
- Set Clear Objectives: Objectives provide a clear picture of what an organization aims to achieve in the long-run. Aligning BPM with these objectives means that each process should contribute toward achieving these broader targets. Implement BPM in such a way that it streamlines operations to meet set objectives more efficiently.
- Performance Measurement and Management: The success of an organization largely depends on its ability to measure and manage its performance. As we discussed in my last article, BPM contributes by providing metrics that help gauge how effective current processes are, and where they might be improved. An effective BPM strategy allows for regular monitoring and tweaking of processes in accordance with strategic goals.
- Resource Allocation: Strategic goals can only be achieved if resources are properly managed. BPM helps identify which processes add the most value and should be prioritized in terms of resource allocation. This aids in aligning resources with key strategic objectives.
Why BPM as a Strategic Enabler
BPM’s ability to improve business processes aligns with the purpose of strategic planning to drive success. When BPM efforts and strategic planning harmonize, organizations can begin to realize significant benefits. These include:
- Enhanced Agility: The combination of BPM and strategic planning enables organizations to be more adaptable and respond quickly to market changes. A well-implemented BPM strategy offers the flexibility to quickly adjust processes in line with the strategic responses to shifting market and customer demands.
- Improved Efficiency: By helping identify redundancies and bottlenecks, BPM can streamline processes for efficiency. This is key to achieving the company’s strategic targets within stipulated timelines and resource limits.
- Cost Reduction: With improved processes comes less waste, inevitably leading to substantial cost savings. These savings can be redirected towards areas that better serve strategic goals.
As we can see, aligning BPM efforts with an organization’s overall strategic goals and objectives is an important step towards allowing companies to deliver consistent, focused, and high-performing processes. It promotes an integrated approach to process improvement, leading to greater efficiency, flexibility, resource optimization, and ultimately profitability. Perhaps the most important step in driving business success is understanding that BPM and strategic planning are inextricably linked, and achieving greatest success lies in their synergy.
— — — — — — — — — — — -
If you found this article helpful, be sure to click like. And course follow me for more on the topics of AI, BPM, Process Mining, Customer Experience, Digital Transformation, and Automation.
Until next time — Keep Transforming 💡
