What are the benefits of BPM?

My podcast guest next week, Theodore Panagacos is a former Management Consultant with Booz & Company and has years of experience helping organizations design and implement business models that improve its service to customers. His book, The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Management: Everything you need to know and how to apply it to your organization has become an Amazon top seller in its category Business Process Management.

I asked in the podcast one of the most basic questions, “What are the benefits of Business Process Management? What do we get out of it?”  Theodore’s answer was simple, to the point and best of all, answered the question.

BPM is all about identifying what you do-do and what you don't do within a business. BPM helps managers identify the day to day activities that the business runs in a visual representation. Having that sort of information allows managers to make more informed decision about again, the day-to-day operation of their business.

When you go down to the improvement level and the actual level analysis level, you can then start looking at time and cost improvements. For example, how many FTE (Full-Time Equivalent) employees are associated with a particular event or task? How long does it take them to execute that task? When you have that insight and information, you can run certain scenarios that allow you to optimize those processes so that your business is running again at optimum efficiency.

You have other potential benefits like ensuring that you adhere to a regulatory compliance. A lot of industries such as the mining industry and even the banking industry, they have tight laws that govern what they can and can't do and more often than not, there are regulatory bodies that govern these laws. They want to know that the bank has their processes documented particularly if you are dealing with sensitive information like people's bank accounts. There are a couple of things here; I mean regulatory, process optimization and manager's insight into how the business is run.