ERP Business Process Management (BPM)

In today’s world, businesses always seek opportunities to improve the productivity or efficiency of their operations, or both, in order to remain relevant in the market. Organizations widely use ERP systems to manage various business aspects and consider Business Process Management (BPM) as a key solution to optimize business processes.

In most organizations, regardless of their size, it is not easy to make changes. However, this is possible only with a clear and systematic vision of your company’s organizational processes, digital instruments, data organization, and hierarchy. This structured notion assists in demarcating what, when, where, and which type of changes your organization needs in order to purposefully map out how these changes will impact your entire business.

Despite the significant market value of BPM in 2021, experts project the segment’s impact on global business processes to reach USD 10.64 billion in 2020, with a projected growth rate of 10 percent. From 2021 to 2028, BPM will account for 5% of the population. This blog post will delve into how combining ERP and BPM can enhance business operations and optimize processes. For more information on ERP, check out this link.

Understanding Business Process Management (BPM)

Business Process Management is defined as a set of practices aimed at improving organizational business processes. It can be defined as the examination, planning, execution, control, and enhancement of activities and workflow within an organization with the intended purpose of making those activities more efficient and effective. BPM prioritizes change and development, necessitating constant optimization and adjustment of business processes to align with the company’s objectives and customer needs.

Importance of BPM in Modern Businesses

With their participation, BPM offers a set of methods and tools for changing the organization of people, processes, and systems. Integration and shared understanding between the business and IT departments facilitate the implementation of a proper structure.

One of the building blocks of PrideERP is business process management (BPM), which engages, automates, and controls your business processes. Our software includes a number of instruments that give an overall picture of the end-to-end processes within your company.

Benefits of BPM for modern businesses

• Enhanced Efficiency: By eliminating inefficiencies through process management, BPM determines the cycle time, which is the amount of time needed to carry out processing activities efficiently.
• Greater Agility: The BPM process allows organizations to respond to changes as quickly as possible in the market, regulation, or internal environment.
• Improved Compliance: BPM helps ensure that processes comply with standards and legal requirements.
• Customer Satisfaction: Efficient working produces happier customers and, hence, improved satisfaction.

Examples of BPM Tools and Techniques

1. Process Mapping: ERP systems incorporate it as a crucial tool for visualizing workflow and business processes. With today’s complex systems and processes, organizations can map out all aspects of work and begin to realize that there may, in fact, be too many steps, unnecessary steps, or multiple ways of accomplishing the same work. This tool integrates all the steps and requirements of a process in ways that make it easier for a firm to communicate them across its departments.
2. Workflow Service (PWS): The system provides you the opportunity to define an end-to-end business process and produce an interaction between Pridesys as well as the employees or other software programs. This tool provides a way of designing business processes and structuring and consolidating them, as well as managing and integrating them through a simple graphic user interface.
3. Business Rules Management: Business rule management (BRM) in ERP systems involves the capture, deployment, management, and sustainment of business rules utilized by the business entity. In other words, these rules define the flow of data, decision-making processes, and the handling of various situations. The BRM tools improve coherence, conformity, and malleability because they make it easier for a business to adjust to changes in laws, customers, or internal requirements.
4. Performance monitoring and analytics: These tools keep records of KPIs and provide reports and data analysis that support various business choices. Performance measures are critical in an organization because they allow it to assess its strengths and weaknesses.
5. Frameworks for business quality management, such as Six Sigma and Lean, are: Six Sigma and Lean are integrated into the ERP system and refer to methods that promote continuous improvement of various organizations’ workflows. Six Sigma targets lowering variation and defects, while Lean seeks to minimize waste and enhance the value stream. The application of these methodologies against an ERP backbone improves CP culture, resulting in high quality, better efficiency, and higher customer value.
6. Implementation Framework: This tool provides decision-makers and IT implementers with comprehensive documentation of the business management system, enabling them to strategize and manage business processes and systems with ease. This tool offers a comprehensive representation of the entire business, including all its processes, regulations, rationales, positions, protections, and information, all presented in detailed documentation. Decision-makers can filter, detect, and quantify their businesses using financial development and other KPIs related to employee performance, business activities, and the ERP system.
7. Process modeling (PPM): This is a good strategy because PPM provides both out-of-the-box and adjustable frameworks on which you can build your business. This allows you to adapt to a model-driven strategy architecture that governs management and IT operations in accordance with business goals.
8. Role-Based Security: In business processes, roles describe who is responsible for the execution of specific work steps. We use this security tool to control secured access at the role level, enabling only relevant personnel to perform specific functions.
9. Automating Applications: Pridesys office automation and communication tools interconnect every aspect of your office, ensuring strategic coordination among all individuals in your organization. When an occurrence reaches a certain level, it also has the capability to alert an appropriate official or a group of people, ensuring satisfactory resolution.

How ERP and BPM Work Together

ERP and BPM are two distinct practices that interrelate to support an organization’s overall objectives and goals.

ERP and BPM systems are closely related since the former can serve as a foundation for the implementation of the latter. While the ERP systems support a large and sound framework for the running of business undertakings, the BPM aims at enhancing the business processes. Altogether, they provide a comprehensive approach to the management of businesses and are considered exceptional tools, each supporting the other.

Benefits of Integrating BPM with ERP

• Improved Efficiency: BPM differs from the ERP system by looking into areas of optimization and making changes, eliminating or decreasing the need for a human touch in the system’s processes.
• Better Decision Making: BPM integrated with ERP offers complete integrated data which is real-time and thus allows timely decision-making. 
• Enhanced Flexibility: BPM enables organizations to realign their processes in response to the environment at a faster pace and ERP systems offer tools and data foundation. 
• Increased Compliance: It is worth mentioning the question of compliance. The regulation of business processes is achieved through BPM, and this question is successfully integrated into the ERP system’s work. 
• Enhanced Control: Obtain control over your business as you make processes within the organization visible. 
• Transparency: The organizational goals that can be aimed at are: obtaining greater transparency of the information, the processes, the activities, and the decisions made. 
• Focused Collaboration: The reason is that when there are activities that require attention from different stakeholders, they must- be accomplished through focused efforts. 

Key Statistics and Insights

• Formal BPM Programs: Today, it is estimated that about 48% of organizations have implemented the use of BPM programs, which means that the application of strict process management is critical. 
• IT-Driven BPM Success: BPM programs that are owned by IT achieved 47% probability of success and 45% probability of being formal. 
• High Priority for IT Leaders: According to the survey conducted recently, 80% of the respondents belonging to IT leaders and senior executives have identified BPM as the main focus area. This priority also applies to positions like CIO, CPO, CTO, and the like. 
• Challenges of BPM Adoption: The problem of its implementation arises from the lack of contributing efforts from the employees, which is an issue reported by 96% of executives regarding BPM’s unsuccessful attempts. 
• Perceived Costs: Out of the companies that do not have BPM software, more than half of them believe that it is expensive, which is a hindrance to integrating it. 
• Cost Savings: Thereby, business organizations can reduce costs by an average of $51,000 on a yearly basis by automating business processes. 
• Compliance Cost Reduction: Process mining has the potential to decrease compliance costs by up to 90%. 
• Savings Through Optimization: Current research shows that 21% of the companies are able to claim that through business process optimization they are able to shave off 10% or more, which can easily be perceived as huge value. 
• Impact of Training: According to the given information, it seems that those heaped of employers, who put a lot on the personnel, providing them with intensive training to implement BPM programs, are 2. Evaluations revealed that the target group is twice as likely to notice improved ROI as compared to the non-target audience.

Key Features of BPM-Integrated ERP Systems

• Process Automation: Using technology to complete tasks faster as well as minimize cases of mistakes.
• Real-Time Data and Analytics: Updating of information, which helps in decision-making processes. 
• Workflow management: It offers means to plan and implement efficient processes and systematically manage business processes across the enterprise. 
• Document Management: Handles business processes’ documentation and keeps them safe and easily accessible while adhering to legal requirements. 
• Customizable Workflows: Enabling organizations to make arrangements suitable to their requirements in the formulation of business processes. 
• Enhanced Collaboration Tools: Enabling the flow of information and cooperation between one department and other departments. 
• Mobile Access: This permits the use of ERP and BPM across customers’ mobile devices, enhancing remote operations and mobile decision-making. 
• Scalability and Flexibility: Be pliable in order to meet the changing needs of the business since the processes can be easily modified and added to in the future as the organization expands. 

Steps to Integrate BPM with ERP

• Assessing Current Processes: Some common goals with procedures are the assessment of existing systems in order to determine improvements that can be made. 
• Choosing the Right BPM Tools: It focused on the selection of tools used in the organization to help support the ERP system, which will require meeting the needs of businesses. 
• Integration Planning: Based on the observations made above, it is recommended to develop a detailed plan for the implementation of BPM in connection with the integration of the ERP system. 
• Training and Change Management: Here, train the staff in the new processes and ensure a transition is done well. 

Case Studies and Actual Facts

Large industrial businesses have experienced numerous obstacles, including high production costs and increased operations expenses. Implementing a BPM-integrated ERP system can help address these difficulties by improving workflow automation and resource usage. This connection can shorten production time by 30% while increasing production reuse by 20%. Furthermore, ERP integrated with BPM can assist firms in achieving high levels of regulatory compliance while minimizing errors. For example, a retail firm dealing with stock management issues and inconsistent customer service used a BPM-integrated ERP system to streamline inventory procedures and specialize client support. This connection increased customer satisfaction by reducing delays and automating processes.

There are various takeaways from these case studies. One critical factor to consider is the relevance of customization in planning and stakeholder involvement. Continuous and recurrent performance measurement helps to maintain system efficiency. It is critical to choose the correct tools and partners for a successful integration. Furthermore, real-time data use and increased cooperation are critical benefits that can dramatically improve operational effectiveness and customer satisfaction.

Closing Remarks

ERP BPM integration offers organizations enormous potential for improving their operation’s efficiency, flexibility, and conformity to legal requirements. In this way, both systems’ strengths align to improve organizational functioning, increase efficiency and accuracy of decision-making, and maintain a strategic advantage in a constantly developing environment. Based on present situation, the integration between ERP and BPM will become more and more important with the development of technology to define future development of business process management. 

Call to Action

Explore the potential of BPM-integrated ERP solutions and evaluate how this solutions can make a difference in your company’s performance. We invite you to contact us to find out how our solutions and services can assist you to obtaining higher operational performance and generating incremental revenues.