Could Your Company Benefit from Better Business Process Management?
Over the past few decades, supply chains have become much more complicated. Globalization, intense customer demands, and new technologies have made things more efficient, but also more multi-faceted. While computer systems remove some of the burden of maze that is managing a supply chain, better business process management can help untangle the intricate web.
What is Business Process Management?
Simply speaking, business process management involves implementing, analyzing, and changing the basic, repetitive processes that make a business’ world go ’round. It’s finding a way to make those processes easier, smoother, and more productive. It looks at the end result of these processes and each step along the way, carefully evaluating the effectiveness of both, always asking whether there’s a way to improve upon the status quo.
What’s the Issue with Using Business Process Management?
Maybe you don’t feel like the status quo is really so bad. Maybe you’re thinking that changing things too much would be more trouble than its worth. Poor process management can hurt your business, though. When processes aren’t managed effectively, the flow of things can be chaotic. That chaos can lead to errors being made, lost time, a lack of accountability when something does go wrong, poor collection or handling of data, and a culture that is less than compelling.
Where Can it be Implemented to Make Things Run Smoother?
Strategic process management can help your supply chain from end to end. Business process management can be implemented in any task that’s consistently repeated within a business. Some examples would be cleaning processes, equipment inspections, inventory management, order fulfillment and processing, invoicing, load dispatching, transportation audits, transportation management, and any safety procedures that are used on a regular basis.
Since business process management can be a complicated process with the end goal that processes become less complicated, it’s important that a dedicated project manager tackles each step towards developing, implementing, and monitoring new processes.
Those steps, according to the Project Management Institute, are:
- Initiation– Deciding which processes need work and getting started on making them better.
- Planning– Deciding how processes and outcomes should look.
- Executing– Actually following the processes laid out.
- Monitoring– Assessing how processes are working and tweaking them for better results.
- Closing– Formally wrapping things up when a process is no longer applicable.
Process management doesn’t have to be done entirely in-house. There are options, like a 3PL provider like BlueGrace, to implement business process management solutions and technologies, without hiring on a dedicated project manager.
