8 Major BPM Challenges & How to Avoid Them in 2024

In some surveys, 70% of business leaders state that business process management (BPM) projects helped them achieve their goals. In contrast, some say that only 15% of their processes are measured and managed successfully. 

The reason behind these different statements is that each firm experiences other BPM challenges, leading some projects to fail and some to succeed. Such BPM failures can be costly and time-consuming for businesses targeting higher productivity and quality. Therefore, business leaders and analysts must learn the top reasons for BPM project failures and how to tackle them. 

 In this article, we go through 8 business process management challenges you might face while employing BPM and tips to turn these disadvantages into benefits.  

What is BPM?

Business process management (BPM) helps monitor and manage business processes to improve effectiveness and efficiency. It can be done through  business process management (BPM) software or with a process intelligence software, such as process mining.

Explore more on BPM benefits and best practices. 

1.Ensure correct data collection

Redundant and erroneous data affect the result of BPM projects because business process maps, models and KPIs rely on such incorrect data. 

For instance, employees who do not fully follow procedures and apply their own short-cuts may not mention all these divergences during the interview. As a result, analysts never find the reasons behind delays in service delivery.  

There are three pieces of advice to ensure that process analysis relies on correct data:

1. Adopting an intelligent BPM software: Process mining extracts the enterprise data registered in company IT systems, and task mining captures user interactions. Then, these tools discover existing processes and map paths and local practices. As a result, analysts rely on real-life data rather than interviews to understand errors. For example, 61% of a survey group benefit from process mining primarily to diagnose factual process data. 
2. Extending data collection phase: In some cases, firms may not have clean data to upload on their systems. In such cases, BPM teams must allocate  much time for data extraction, cleaning and wrangling. Read more on data collection challenges and their solutions. 
3. Improving data quality: Businesses are recommended to improve their data by
   1. Automating data entry processes, 
   2. Classifying data with random forest algorithm 
   3. Removing duplicate records. 

It can be useful to benefit from a data quality tool at this stage. 

2. Leverage the tool that suits your needs the best

Various technology-based solutions can map, mine, capture, analyze, monitor and automate business processes (See Figure 1). 

RPA, BPA, BPM system, hyper automation all correspond to different necessities of the firms. For example, if BPM teams’ goal is to reduce manual processes and repetitive tasks they will be automating mundane business processes by leveraging RPA or intelligent automation. 

This is why choosing one tool that will not increase your ROI may be a vain attempt. In fact, 40% of business analysts are willing to change their business process management solution with a new BPM software.

BPM trends suggest that process intelligence and process automation tools are becoming prominent approaches to BPM projects. For instance, leaders aim to embrace automation tools by 56% and process mining by 39% as the main BPM tools. 

Learn more about the process improvement framework and our recommendations for potential adopters of each tool. 

3. Increase process visibility as the first thing

When executives do not fully understand their business process, they cannot identify the root cause behind the issues. As a result, they may invest in wrong solutions for the problems. 

For example, a bank can invest in BPM solutions and RPA to improve execution quality. On the other hand, the issue is the lack of effective communication between the back and front offices.   

BPM teams can bring real time visibility to their operations by gathering data and mapping them with the help of process modeling, process mining and task mining capabilities. 

Also, some process mining tools can generate a digital twin of an organization, a virtual replica of the given process. These DTOs can reveal mundane tasks and activities to be automated, which is why process mining is considered the key enabler of automation by 76%. 

4. Invest in skill development 

42% of the employees say they are not engaged in any training for adopting process techniques. 

This disadvantage has faded with more BPM software adopting a low code/ no code approach to democratize their tools and streamline the user experience. 

For example, process mining offers easy dashboards, and simplified process maps to view resources and parties involved in the process flow. This way, process owners can take necessary actions, such as reallocating resources or improving internal communication. 

Employees can spare time to develop other skills or embrace new methods and IT systems by utilizing a process mining platform. 

5. Develop process KPIs 

It is essential to sustain process improvement and reengineering for large BPM initiatives. For example, in a survey, only 16% of companies stated that their transformation efforts improved and maintained their process performance. Therefore, BPM teams must develop clear key performance indicators (KPIs) and set objectives to

• Evaluate the BPM impact on their operations  
• Pinpoint areas for further optimization. 

One suggestion is to leverage process mining. Process mining provides a dashboard based on the performance data that includes common metrics to assess process efficiency, effectiveness, cycle time and compliance. Some process mining vendors offer predictive capabilities to identify potential issues before they occur. 

By leveraging these dashboards, BPM teams can create a roadmap and define their goals. They can seamlessly communicate with relevant parties on these company objectives.  

6. Mitigate risks in complex processes 

Dynamic market trends and customer demands require organizational agility. On the other hand, only 30% of companies could successfully transform  

76% of business leaders associate these low success rates with the complexity and interdependency of the process landscape. Any change in the operational workflow can lead to missing errors, operational disruptions and other process risks. This is why BPM teams must monitor and predict the impact of these changes. 

For instance, suppose a bank improved its loan processing by introducing a new document-filling method. However, the adoption slowed down the loan approval process and led to wrong financial statement generation. Such a mistake is costly because it lowers customer experience and results in high audit fees. 

One way to prevent such incidents is to generate a DTO and simulate how the change they aim to implement might affect the entire workflow. Another suggestion is to look for tools that can analyze complex processes, such as multi-level process mining.  

7. Constantly monitor BPM 

63% of RPA adopters complained that their time expectations failed,  while 37% complained about the cost expectations. It is because process analysts implement the change and file the BPM project away. However, process management requires continuous tracking, improving and managing the change implemented. 

An intelligent tool like process mining can automatically tracks the change implemented and updates the discovered process models accordingly. Such capability allows analysts to continuously improve their BPM project by seamlessly monitoring and measuring process performance.

8. Keep an eye on innovation

BPM ensures efficient management and improvement for higher quality processes. However, some discussions mention that BPM limits the process innovation opportunities. Since 84% of organizations consider innovation a significant aspect of their growth, such debate may discourage companies on business process management.

One way to avoid such BPM challenges is to legitimize the intended changes by estimating their potential results for optimizing inefficient processes. 

A DTO can help measure the expected ROI for different scenarios and determine the best decision when analysts notice that investments may not bring the desired outcome. This way, BPM teams can start looking for other forms of optimizing their process performance, which usually paves into innovative and creative ideas. 

Further reading 

Explore more on process management, knowledge and transformation by reading:

• Enable Process Transformation in 6 Easy Steps
• 3 Ways Process Mining Streamlines Process Management
• Process Knowledge: 3 Steps to Manage it Better

Compare process mining, task mining and DTO vendors through our data-driven and comprehensive vendor lists before choosing a tool for you.

Other technologies to overcome BPM challenges, such as:

• Workflow management softwareBusiness process management softwareLow-code/No-code development platformOnboarding software

Check out comprehensive and constantly updated list of process mining case studies to find out more process mining real-life examples.

Assess different vendors with a transparent methodology yourself by downloading our checklist: 

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