BPM SaaS: Best Design Practices

Although the idea of business process management (BPM) is relatively new, it has become trendy these days, with the BPM market about to reach $14.4 billion, or 10.5% CAGR, by 2025. Combined with SaaS capabilities, this market holds great potential to help businesses grow and improve the efficiency of operations. 

Nevertheless, proper BPM SaaS deployment remains an open question, given the many failures and mistakes. 

This article will guide you through:

• BPM purpose,

• best design practices,

• the best BPM SaaS examples you can rely on while building your digital solutions,

• how to introduce BPM into your enterprise.

Among other reasons, many BPM deployments fail because they don’t dedicate enough attention to design. To prevent you from making this mistake, Arounda designers share the key insights from our business practice so you can build SaaS products that actually improve business operations. With over five years of experience in the market, we’ve got expertise in building SaaS products and ensuring a strong web presence for our clients.

What Are Business Process Management Practices?

Streamlined workflow, as part of effective operational management, can eliminate the impact of human error and generally improve business performance. In this regard, BPM, or business process management, is an approach that helps organizations standardize their operations and coordinate the work of different team members.

BPM methods take over these actions with existing processes and systems:

1. Modeling

2. Identification

3. Efficiency measurement

4. Efficiency assessment

5. BPM design and implementation of changes

6. Automatization and digitization 

Thus, automation of optimized business processes is the ultimate aim for BPM — and here is where SaaS, or automation software, enters the stage. 

However, as a discipline rather than a tool, business process management is mainly associated with a set of methods and practices that help companies remain competitive, improve their current operations and organization’s culture, and accurately address customer needs.

How Design Fits into BPM?

Keeping things visual is essential for successful project execution. However, when it comes to BPM, this practice toward enhancing enterprise-level workflows becomes efficient when it relies on design and user feedback. 

While designing software as a service, user feedback collection is the must-have stage to predict user reaction and behavior while interacting with a product. In other words, it lets designers detect customer pain, clarify the real needs, and address the problems with a product that relies on relevant information. 

To check more about the peculiarities of usability testing, user interview, focus group, and A/B testing, check our overview of UX research methods.   

With user feedback collected, designers can build a customer-focused SaaS product and improve the overall experience of the product development lifecycle. In this regard, the emphasis on customer experience introduces empathy, a crucial element in design thinking methodology.

Regarding business strategy, design thinking has proved to be one of the ways to win users’ hearts and gain a competitive advantage. According to Statista, 60% of consumers rate usability as the most important design characteristic for an online shop. 

This way, design in BPM addresses several business areas, including strategic growth, promotional campaign, product experience, and customer service, by managing the customer needs and desires.

BPM Best Practices

Relying on best practices is key to gaining competitive advantages and making sure you avoid mistakes that could lead to costly consequences. Also, this brings you more confidence and clarity in predicting the results, which is valuable while making business-critical decisions. 

Prioritize workflow steps

Categorizing workflow steps is the thing worth considering at the very beginning of the BPM lifecycle. Certain steps should take precedence over others, and flow directions must be established as soon as possible to keep things organized and efficient. Otherwise, you'll find yourself juggling between a lot of tasks that are not prioritized correctly.

Accurate “current state” and “as is” business models are equally important since they provide the foundation for BPM optimization. Also, when designing features such as steps, pages, and labels, they will be placed where they can easily be seen and used.

Automate workflow

The key to effective business process management (BPM) is to automate it. If a task doesn’t lend itself to automation, it’s better not to do it at all — or if you must, document what you did and why so that others can learn from your example.

At first, it may seem convenient to keep doing a task manually, but it will hurt your business in the long run. You can accelerate and optimize the workflow associated with this task by storing documentation and detailed instructions related to your routine tasks in BPM SaaS. You and other team members can look back in time and apply what was learned from what’s already been done.

Pick the appropriate workflow model

While applying the BPM approach, you can pick among different BPM tools, depending on the nature of the processes you want to improve:

1. Sequential model is useful for short processes

2. State machine model for diverse processes

3. Parallel execution for processes that develop separately and then node

4. Choice of events for different processes that develop after the node

5. Event with timeout for processes with strict deadlines

When using any of these models, it’s important to customize and standardize your pick. Working with BPM requires the collaboration of various specialists: business analysts, product owners, testers, and designers who are directly involved in the processes that require optimization. After the process is adapted to your enterprise, it’s vital to turn it into a standard procedure with a strict timeline and fixed workflow.

Think of customer experience first

Understanding the customer journey is the basis of a successful BPM. The more you focus on your customers, the more they will enjoy their experience with your company and want to come back. 

Consider all aspects of the user's experience: what makes them feel good about using your product or service, how easy it is to navigate, do they find relevant the content they see, etc. Mapping the customer journey is a powerful tool to establish a clear purpose for your business and meet your customers with the solution they strive for.

Define KPIs and track the results

It’s important to determine how you will measure the success of your BPM incentives and constantly work on their improvement. In this regard, KPIs will help you track progress in both qualitative and quantitative terms, meaning the speed and profits together with employer satisfaction and motivation at work. This way, you will see the complete picture of your efforts.

While tracking the results, it’s worth designing a measurement framework for each KPIs. The metrics can be different, ranging by goals (short-term or long-term) and feedback source (external or internal). The main idea is to collect feedback from all stakeholders to understand the expectations better and make the process more transparent for everyone involved.

Best BPM Examples

Automation software, or software that performs tasks on behalf of humans, is a great tool for boosting BPM practices at the workplace. In this section, we’ve picked the top 3 software tools worth your attention.

IBM Business Process Manager

This IBM tool supports the whole BPM process, from discovery to optimization. It includes end-to-end automation for IT and non-IT processes, enables collaboration with different stakeholders, and offers flexible integration with other technologies. An advanced version includes Integration Designer and supports Integration Services associated with process applications.

Oracle BPM Suite

With a powerful business analytics dashboard feature, this BPM tool offers one platform to manage operations end-to-end. It supports various process types, from the back office to the enterprise level. This tool also includes collaboration, role-based access control, and reporting capabilities.

Monday.com

Monday.com is a frequent member of various best BPM software ratings, and there is no surprise. You can use this tool to manage, plan and execute projects. Additionally, it features integration with leading apps like Slack or Trello, making communications even easier.

Monday's interface makes everything clear at a glance, which allows you to focus on your work while still being able to monitor progress easily.

Arounda Can Help You Design BPM SaaS

When optimizing the processes in a built software, BPM has proved itself as one of the most effective approaches. This discipline lets you categorize and automate workflows, stick to measurable KPIs, improve your operations, and maintain the focus on customer pains. Combined with design thinking and SaaS capabilities, BPM is a powerful tool to gain and keep a competitive edge.

If you need any help with business process management, related to BPM training and creating BPM software, you can drop us a line! We can provide full-cycle design and development services and consult you on any BPM-related issues. 

Feel free to rely on us, we have vast experience in helping SaaS companies reach their business aims in the digital domain.