Business Process Management (BPM) is sometimes a difficult thing to define, let alone make more efficient. The emergence of software and computers into all kinds of business and industry have certainly made things easier, but they’ve also made them considerably more complicated.

BPM.com defines it as “a discipline involving any combination of modeling, automation, execution, control, measurement, and optimization of business activity flows, in support of enterprise goals, spanning systems, employees, customers, and partners within and beyond the enterprise boundaries.”

That encompasses quite a bit. It’s no wonder that BPM, however your particular enterprise does it, can be a slow and meticulous process. There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to how a given business works.

Any BPM platform worthy of the name has the capacity to handle a great many of the functions listed above, allowing the user to streamline the workflow of business. It will collate and display all the information you need to make necessary adjustments on the fly and keep everyone involved in the loop by sending them what they need to know to do their parts at peak efficiency. Collaboration is key and well-run BPM allows this better than almost anything else.

Here are a few things you might consider when you’re trying to streamline the streamlining process even further.

Customers First

It sounds like a cliché, and a thoroughly outdated one, but think about it: your goal or end result is something that will please your clients. So why not start from there and work backward? When you start with the idea of finished work, then figure out how you can get there to wherever the beginning point is, it’s sometimes easier to see the redundancies and flows that every so often every make things slower than they need to be.

Eliminate Redundancies

This sounds like it would be self-evident, but sometimes these are difficult to catch, especially when there are multiple people involved. BPM can give you a good overview of who is doing what, making it a lot easier to eliminate what would otherwise be “busywork”. Naturally, some redundancy is necessary, to make sure no mistakes were made, or to reduce the likelihood of mistakes, but it’s important to find the best balance possible, and minimize the amount of data entry necessary. Getting your data right the first time, then letting it go from there can speed things up a great deal.

Ease Up On the Load

BPM is supposed to make your job (and everyone else’s job) easier. So let it. Automation is a key aspect of BPM and computers can do so many things a great deal faster than human beings can do, and do them repeatedly without error. It’s instinctive for many to kind of look over the computer’s shoulder as it works, or to be uncomfortable will putting certain functions into the metaphorical hands of a machine, but isn’t that the reason for acquiring a software platform in the first place? Let it do its work, and you’ll find yours a lot easier to accomplish.

Build Upon Your Success

One of the great things about a computer system is that it documents and saves its own data. This documentation can be a wonderful tool for you to use, when you’re trying to increase the speed of your business processes. Over time, information produces trends, and it becomes easy to see exactly where you can tighten things up (or loosen them up as the case may be) in order to really get everything running as efficiently as possible.

Communication Is Key

A major part of any BPM system is collaboration. Not only does this allow everyone to be in step with everyone else, it allows for the knowledge of any given individual involved to grow exponentially, because what each person learns or discovers is new knowledge for everyone. In the past, collaboration was a somewhat exclusive business – if you weren’t at the meeting or on the email list, you didn’t get the information. Modern systems are inclusive. Because anyone can participate, anyone can contribute, and you never know where the next great innovation might arise. It may very well come from an unexpected direction.

BPM has many benefits, but often an easy learning curve is not one of those benefits. It’s easier if you remember that it is not so much a set of discrete steps as a new way of doing things. Through your processes, you’re going to make your business into a unified whole like never before, and the method in which you do things needs to take that into consideration. Making one part more efficient while neglecting the rest will more than likely create a logjam rather than a business-wide benefit. These are the things to consider when using BPM at all times.

Once you’ve got everything working in your unique way for your unique business, you may very well find your business processes running faster and easier than ever before.