5 Process Management Best Practices in 2024

Hazal Şimşek

Process improvement

Updated on Mar 1

3 min read

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5 Process Management Best Practices in 2024

Table of contents

1. Set realistic performance metrics 2. Communicate with relevant teams 3. Focus on customers 4. Find the balance 5. Coordinate process-enabling systems Further reading

Business process management (BPM) supports business strategy and guides analysts on investments, identifying opportunities for continuous process improvement. However, it is not always easy to generate a process management program that would bring a positive outcome to the business leaders and analysts. A few tips to improve the success of your project can be helpful before starting your process management project.

In the rest of the article, we’ll explore 5 best practices for process management and how they are relevant to achieving BPM.

1. Set realistic performance metrics

Process management and process analysis go hand in hand because to manage your processes you first should analyze them. Therefore, you should focus on discovering your processes, which will allow you to notice pain points and the aspects you can improve.

You should set realistic performance indicator (KPI) targets and monitor them based on such analysis. Monitoring these measurements helps you track the effect of the change you implement. Such KPIs can ensure that your management plan translates into progress and improvement.

Quick tip:

Leverage process intelligence tools such as process mining and task mining to bring visibility to your processes. Then go over your insights and set your priorities, end-goals and strategy to specify target performance metrics.

2. Communicate with relevant teams

Large processes include several departments or teams which can affect the execution and performance of the process. You should identify these teams and clarify the tasks and activities they are responsible for. Such clarification lets you decide if the roles and responsibilities or organizational structures are appropriate for the workflow. If not, you can start working on how to change them to align your processes.

Moreover, these teams are important to consult during your process management journey. They can provide you with context and details that you may overlook. For example, employees can explain their resources for efficient process flows. Their complaints and necessities serve as a criterion while redesigning or modifying a process.

Quick tips:

You can organize workshops and interviews with the relevant teams and departments. However, it is crucial to prevent biases by backing up qualitative data with insights driven by quantitative data.

3. Focus on customers

One of the goals for process management and improvement is to enhance customer experience. However, business leaders tend to believe that well-managed processes will immediately lead to higher customer satisfaction, which is a myth that needs to be dispelled.

If you want to achieve efficiency while keeping your customers happy, you should understand the contributing factors. Therefore, you should categorize your processes based on customer orientation. Then, it would help if you prioritize your core processes that concentrate on delivering services to clients or solving customer issues. Such a strategy can help your business implement impactful change and increase customer satisfaction.

Quick tips:

You can reach out to your customers or your audiences for their feedback. Use surveys and interviews to collect feedback and analyze the results for useful insights. You can also leverage CRM data while determining the core processes and what your customers like the most.

Explore how process mining can discover CRM data to increase engagement with customers.

4. Find the balance

Process management journey can cause you to skip over details because you are too concerned with the whole process or you are so overwhelmed by information that you forget what you were doing in the first place.

In a process, every step and task includes various activities and sub-tasks to complete. You should find a level of detail that could allow you to find the balance while generating impact for your business. Then, you can visualize the workflow and prioritize the tasks and activities that are required to be modified or automated.

Quick tips:

Process mining can discover the entire process and visualize it for you to zoom in and set the area of interest for further analysis. Then, you can dive into details for each task by using task mining. You can also leverage process orchestration tools if you notice that your tasks need to be unified.

5. Coordinate process-enabling systems

More and more businesses adopt process-enabling systems, such as ERP (e.g, SAP), CRM (e.g, Salesforce) and SCM over the years. Firms rely on such systems to integrate their processes, data and transactions.

On the other hand, it can be a challenge to implement these systems together due to over-customization or user adoption problems. Consequently, the lack of coordination across these systems can lead to ill-functioning of processes.

You should standardize and coordinate these systems to maintain process excellence.

Quick tips:

You can apply process mining to SAP or Salesforce to monitor these systems and pinpoint the challenges for improvements. Also, recent trends show that companies look for AI applications and RPA integration for ERP. Process mining and DTOs are RPA enablers and could identify automation opportunities and calculate the ROI to assess the impact of such change.