What is Business Process Transformation?
Business process transformation is the comprehensive redesign and restructuring of business processes to achieve significant improvements in operational efficiency and agility. Business Process Transformation can be driven by a variety of factors, such as the need to reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, or increase competitiveness. It is more like reengineering the critical processes, functions, workflows, tools, and technologies to fit the business demands and accelerate the time-to-market.
Business Process Transformation involves radically changing the elements of your processes to meet new business goals. Usually, these new goals are centered around a new digital transformation implementation.
Most companies engage in business process transformation when they need to make a drastic update to existing processes. Using this process transformation methodology, you can modernize your processes, incorporate new technology, save costs, and better integrate your core systems.
Business process transformation is part of the larger concept of business process management (BPM).
Steps in Business Process TransformationBusiness process transformation follows similar steps to business process management but attempts to make bigger and more drastic changes.
1. Identify the goals of the transformation
Are you primarily trying to upgrade systems? Incorporate new technology? Adapt processes to a new organizational structure? What has caused the need?
2. Establish baseline metrics
Collect the data needed to show that your business process transformation will be successful. Think through cost, time, number of errors, and other metrics you can measure.
3. Bring in all stakeholders
Ask all those involved in the process for their feedback on what worked well in the prior process and what they expect out of the new one.
4. Map out the best scenario
Using a diagramming tool, create the ideal workflow path including human and system tasks that need to take place.
5. Implement in a testing environment
Use a BPM tool to create a mock process and see how it runs between people and data.
6. Set live and monitor
Include small teams at first to the new process and closely monitor the progress and any changes that need to happen for the process to succeed.
Challenges in Business Process Transformation
As with any huge paradigm shift, business process transformation creates a number of challenges that must be resolved in order to succeed.
1. Weak sponsorship engagement.
Throughout the entire lifecycle, from inception to development and deployment, you’ll need strong sponsorship from a person who will not only champion your requirements but also be patient enough to wait for the results to manifest. Without strong sponsorship, it can be more than a challenge to complete the transformation process.
2. Change in management practices
Constantly changing management practices another challenge for business process transformation. As inefficient as your old process might have been, you will always have people who prefer “the way we used to do it”. As a part of implementing a business process transformation, you need to use good change management principles to bring everyone along.
3. Integration challenges
Integration challenges can be significant in business process transformation. If you don’t choose the right BPM platform, you maybe very limited in what you can integrate with other software. You may realize from the beginning how challenging it will be to link to different platforms.
4. Missing key objectives
To miss key objectives is a big challenge. Many business process transformation efforts end up only digitizing a process and have no noticeable effect on the efficiency of the process. Don’t settle for a dressed up version of your old business process. Make sure your successes are clearly defined.
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