12 Tips to Improve Your BPM System

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Want to squeeze from from your business process management system? BPM experts offer twelve tips for efficiency and productivity.

The market for business process management (BPM) software has been strong in recent years, as the promise of greater efficiency led to double-digit growth as the rest of the economy stalled.

But as with any enterprise application software, it must be used properly to get maximum benefits. Herewith are a dozen tips for getting the most out of your BPM system.

1) Start with quality data. “To optimize the benefits your business will receive from your BPM software, you need to start with quality data,” said Scott Herron, CEO of MaintenanceNet, a provider of BPM solutions. “Ensure that your system is populated with actionable business intelligence so that you can further streamline business processes and avoid any setbacks caused by inaccurate or missing information.”

2) Identify, model and analyze key business processes. “Use BPM to model and analyze key business processes – those that upon improvement would result in the most business benefits … or improvement of key metrics,” said M.A. Ketabchi, chief strategist at Progress Software. “Make sure you simulate the process based on expected scenarios and data – and engage your operation and business analysts and managers in this step.”

3) Be realistic regarding adoption and results. “Instead of planning for every possible permutation, approval process, or exception, aim for 80 percent adoption,” argued Daniel O’Leary, vice president of Global Solutions at LincWare. “You can always fall back to email or other systems for cases that are uncommon, and this will save you a ton of time and money and lead to higher user adoption.”

4) Include your partners in your BPM ecosystem. “External sales/channel partners play an important role in bringing your product to market,” noted Herron. “Grant them access to your BPM solutions when relevant, particularly those systems impacting sales cycles, sales transactions and service sales opportunities. As a result, you’ll see shorter sales cycles and faster time-to-close ratios.”

Read the additional tips about business process management at Enterprise Apps Today.