Properly identifying business processes, modeling them and managing them optimally is not easy. But in the all-digital era, no company can skip this step at the risk of losing competitiveness, profitability or damaging its image.

In this article, we give you advice for identifying your key processes and implementing an effective and sustainable process management policy (BPM).

What is a business process ?

A simple definition could be: “A business process is a set of interrelated activities to carry out a task, a project or achieve an objective related to the business strategy. »

The business processes can be specific to a body of the company (accounting, human resources, IT), transverse between several services (management of a customer order, hiring of a new employee) or even inter-company (management of the supplier, outsourced payroll/accounting).

Each task in the process therefore requires inputs that it will use to provide the next task with the information it needs and advance the process to completion.

Whether they are identified or not, optimized or not, monitored or not, the processes govern the life of the company and determine its productivity, the quality of the services rendered and ultimately, its profitability and sustainability. Having an effective business process management (BPM) policy and the tools to support it is giving your company the foundations for serene growth.

How to identify its key processes?

The key processes are those that are at the heart of your company’s strategy and that will allow you to achieve the objectives you have set for yourself (profitability, customer satisfaction, agility, etc.).

As these objectives are normally renewed every year, it is normal that the key processes are also different. This is why it is important to define for each action indicators to measure whether the changes made during the past year have been effective or not.

The Efficiency Matrix

To identify the key processes, the simplest way is to create an efficiency matrix listing all of your online processes and the objectives to be achieved in a column in ascending order of importance. By weighting the results, you will thus obtain the list of processes to be optimized as a priority.

We will soon publish an example implementation along with a model matrix. Subscribe to our blog to receive it!

The impact matrix

Attention, it is important to keep in mind that the processes are not all independent. An action taken on one of them can have an effect (positive or negative) on other processes or impact a large number of information systems. An effective way to avoid surprises and to have an impact matrix of your processes or even better that this matrix is integrated directly into your process management tool if you have one.

Finally, identifying the key processes of a company is not easy. An error can have serious consequences on the achievement of the objectives set. Do not hesitate to be accompanied in this process.

The business process management (BPM) policy?

Why implement a BPM policy?

The growth of the company, the multiplication of tools and the agility necessary for constant adaptation to the market necessarily increases the number of processes and their complexity. It is then essential for the company to have one or more tools allowing it to have a global and dynamic vision of all its processes and to be able to manage them.

But tools alone are not enough. Their implementation and use must be framed by rules and procedures that coordinate activities to achieve the company’s objectives as efficiently and economically as possible.

Certainly, the development and application of such a policy within the company will have immediate effects on the entire organization, services and tools. However, keep in mind that it can be carried out gently, gradually and not overlook a change management action with your employees.

The benefits of implementing a BPM policy

We thus immediately perceive the advantages of such a business process management policy at the heart of the company:

• An effective tool for detecting and improving the company’s key processes, making it possible to achieve the strategic objectives set more quickly and more efficiently or to pass a milestone.
• A 360° vision of all processes in which all tasks are identified, structured and modelled, enlightening each employee on the importance of their role in the organization and giving meaning to their work.
• An opportunity to break down silos to move towards a cross-functional and collaborative organization to regain serenity and empower each actor within their scope.
• An undeniable gain in terms of agility and responsiveness in the face of the constant changes required of companies to remain competitive.
• Great flexibility to support organizational and technical changes linked to these developments (evolution of working methods, adaptation of tools to business needs, etc.).
• And finally, a contribution in terms of efficiency to put the right resources where needed, improve productivity by identifying and automating unrewarding tasks.

Although necessary, the development of a process management policy is often a source of concern for managers because it brutally questions the organization of activities and then reveals the immensity of the task. This is why it is important to prepare well in advance for the implementation stages of this policy and to register its actions over time.
Our next article will be devoted to the implementation of a sustainable and effective process management policy.

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