Business Process Management: A Modular Approach

The Way We Wish It Was; The Way It Really Is

In a perfect business world, every process is automated. There is no need to email spreadsheets back and forth (of course, each email containing a separate spreadsheet version), no need for documents with task checklists being passed around from department to department, and no need to call regular meetings to compare notes and make sure everyone is working from the same checklist or version of the spreadsheet.

Business Process Management

Enter business process management (BPM), the purpose of which is to make businesses more efficient and thus more profitable. A good example would be the CRM, which purports to automate the sales and customer service processes; to, in effect, unify the teams and give management a single version of the truth when it comes to customer and sales data. This is all well and good. Businesses should exploit the BPM tools that are on the market today, but they should also exercise caution. These tools can cost a fortune in license and maintenance, and they can be difficult to use and tedious to implement. They sometimes provide a great user experience for some lines of business but are a nightmare for others. That’s because no matter how you slice it, the one-size-fits-all approach to business process management simply does not work, and a cumbersome solution is the last thing you need.

So What’s the Alternative?

The cynics in the audience might say that businesses should just do it the old-fashioned way: stick to the ad hoc processes that they always used. After all, things have worked this long. But, have they? Are employees as productive as they could be? Are they as happy as they could be? Are they wasting time on tasks that could be done with a few clicks of a mouse? And, is your product quality being affected? If you’re doing it the old way, these are some of the consequences you have to deal with.

Introducing the Modular Approach

Another way to embark on a BPM project is to take a modular approach. Think of it this way: You own a mortgage company and you want to automate the mortgage origination process. Why pay for a system that also manages the sales process, the customer service process and the purchasing process, among other things? Not that you won’t want to at some point, but that’s what “modular” means. You attack your process problems in pieces. Or, you can do it all at once, but the structure of the modular solution means that all LOBs can have processes that adapt to how they want to do business. And, with the Convergence, preconfigured models are already developed and available, with a low-code structure that makes in-house customization and modification fast and easy.

This Must Cost a Fortune

On the contrary, it’s Software-as-a-Service, so you don’t have to invest in software or proprietary hardware. That also means that upgrades are done automatically, so you don’t have to have a non-production environment running during the upgrade process.

Conclusion

There are several reasons why a modular approach to business process management is better than the “Godzilla software” approach, but the principal ones are these:

• Flexibility: With the low-code structure, you can fine tune processes without spending a fortune on consultants.
• Affordability: It’s in the cloud, so upgrades are done automatically and no hardware or software investment is required.
• Adaptability: You select and implement the processes at your pace. You don’t pay for anything you don’t use.

It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? A solution that’s really a solution. A business process management tool that does what you need and want it to do. Nothing more and nothing less. Convergence by Covius.