Business Project Management (BPM) is gaining popularity among businesses worldwide. It allows companies to analyze the current state of business activities, identify areas for improvement, and ensure smooth and time-efficient performance. According to the research, its market size is expected to reach $16 billion by 2023, showing a rise of 14% from 2017.
However, to gain popularity in the tough market competition not only should the company implement BPM, but also keep up with the latest technologies in the sphere. In this article we will cover the top BPM trends of 2021 you should be aware of.
Why does business process management matter?
Business process management is a tool letting companies control, analyze, and improve business activities. It’s worth noting that BPM should be distinguished from task management. Although the latter can be a result of business process management, it is aimed at handling activities arising from non-repeatable projects. BPM, in contrast, is a wider discipline concentrated on repetitive and ongoing core business activities. Here are some of the benefits you can enjoy after implementing BPM in your business:
- Improved efficiency. BPM helps companies to enhance their performance by identifying processes necessary for optimal workflow and eliminating redundancies, slowing it down.
- Nowadays, companies have to be agile to stay competitive in the market. They should respond readily to technological advancements, new strong competitors, and other market conditions, affecting business performance. A well-implemented BPM allows companies to adopt changes due to a clear roadmap and team’s full understanding of workflow processes.
- Reduced errors. BPM lets companies prevent performance mistakes by ensuring that every team member is aware of their responsibilities and meets the established requirements. Moreover, by automating repeated processes, BPM minimizes human errors.
- Better compliance. BPM organizes processes in a more detailed and visible way. Thus, companies avoid issues with legal liability and show better compliance with both internal and external regulations.
- Enhanced collaboration within the company. Business process management fosters improved communication among employees, reduced misunderstandings and conflicts within the teams due to better process awareness.
Business process management market trends
BPM doesn’t stay at a standstill. It tries to provide companies with more innovative solutions to improve their performance and meet ever-growing customer demands. Here are the top 5 business process management trends for 2021 and beyond.
1. AI Integration
AI has proven to be a driving force of technological progress. With time passing, more companies acknowledge the importance of AI embedded BPM solutions for their business processes. Implementing AI in BMP companies can benefit from a vast number of advantages:
- Process Automation. Also called Robotic Process Automation (RPA), it frees up managers from volume-large monotonous processes, allowing them to concentrate more on solving complex tasks and making high-level decisions.
- Predictive analysis examines data from various sources, identifying patterns that may stay unnoticed by a human manager, and forms an efficient plan of action.
- IoT integration allows companies to automatically set off processes connected with external devices.
- Process mining identifies models and behavior of business processes. Moreover, it can give some advice and predict the results of the business activities.
2. Increased collaboration in the workforce
Improved collaboration is a key to working process optimization and increased customer experience. In 2021 BPM will continue integrating chats and data sharing solutions for intuitive communication among employees. For example, features like process-related alerts and data integration will help avoid redundant communication through emails, meetings, etc., making business workflow more agile, time-efficient, and productive.
3. Low-code BPM solutions
The future of BPM will be tightly connected with low-code or even no-code platforms that allow rapid development and delivery of personalized BPM solutions to various businesses. Low-code systems speed up and facilitate the development process, reducing the need for BMP customization. Apart from that, low-code and no-code BPM solutions offer:
- Reduced costs (due to less code, testing, etc.);
- Simplified updates and maintenance;
- Minimized dependency on BPM consulting services or developing teams.
4. Mobile BPM solutions
Many companies stick to the opinion that business is more efficient when conducted “on the go”. Thus, mobile BPM solutions are gaining growing popularity, helping companies achieve more flexible workflow processes with improved employee engagement. By going mobile, BPM will let companies gain:
- Improved access to data regardless of employee location;
- Increased employee productivity due to their enhanced engagement;
- High profits due to optimized company performance.
5. Adaptive case management (ACM)
Despite having a common goal of optimizing business performance via automation, BPM and ACM concentrate on different aspects. While BPM is more about well-defined business processes where business logic follows established rules, ACM deals with dynamic process automation and handles processes that may run into exceptions. However, nowadays, some BPM developing companies are starting to include functionalities capable of dealing with adaptive cases in their BPM solutions as well.
Summary
The modern market embraces a vast number of diverse BPM solutions helping companies automate business processes, reduce errors, and achieve robust performance. In 2021 and beyond BPM will continue to develop, introducing innovative features in business management and fostering both employee and customer satisfaction.
If you are hesitating whether to use BPM in your business, we recommend you opt for a flexible and easily adjusted open-source BPM workflow tool able to adapt to the latest BPM technology trends. It will improve your business workflow and let you stay competitive in the fast-evolving technological world.
