Business Entities’ Lifecycle Management: Do’s and Don’ts
As your company grows, the importance of well-orchestrated business processes emerges. The more employees, customers and business entities are involved in daily operations, the more complex your business ecosystem becomes, and the probability of disruptions and failures increases correspondingly.
To deal with these challenges, companies implement business entities’ management, or business process management (BPM) that integrates the workflows and streamlines communication between teams.
This article shares some tips on how to effectively manage business entities at each stage of the business process lifecycle.
The modeling stage: Envision how it should work
To establish a solid BPM framework, it’s crucial to take a step back, analyze the current state of the processes and then identify what can be added, improved or automated. You’ll need to break each of the processes into steps, determine the main stakeholders, and define its purposes. With all that data on hand, you can now visualize the process as a whole by drawing a flowchart or diagram.
After you have outlined the current state of your business entities and their interrelations, map out your vision of how it all should work in the ideal scenario. In other words, you need to determine what results you’re planning to achieve with this specific process and how. It’d be especially helpful to visualize the desired workflows using any of the notation systems, such as BPMN (Business process modeling notation).
The implementation stage: Don’t hesitate to use automation
Many routine operations like document approvals, onboarding, data processing, reporting, managing purchase orders, and other common tasks can be easily automated to save time, money and effort. Most of these processes don’t require human participation, for example, sending approval from one stakeholder to the other or checking for current status.
BPM automation software like Workflow Engine can help make your process management more efficient — from streamlining document approvals to processing data from external systems and devices and even handling long-running processes that take weeks or months.
The testing stage: Don’t ignore it
Once you have visualized and adjusted your processes, you need to launch them. However, the chances are high that at least some of the new workflows might not work as planned. Therefore, it’d be a good idea to first run them in a testing mode or apply them to a small group of users before upscaling them to the whole company.
Through testing, some major problems and bottlenecks might be revealed. Perhaps, you will then consider making changes to the process or certain stages. It’s always helpful to gather as much performance data and feedback from employees as possible, since it will help you get closer to the optimal process execution.
The execution stage: Keep optimizing processes
At this stage, you’re ready to upscale your business processes for the entire company. However, this doesn’t mean you can now kick back and relax, since something can always go wrong, especially at the beginning. So, it’s important to keep monitoring and reviewing processes at all times to prevent potential bottlenecks and detect opportunities for improvement.
Business process optimization involves creating a system of crucial metrics and measurements and can itself be considered as a separate process. But it’s certainly worth it since you’ll be able to save a lot of effort, improve output quality, reduce execution times, and get rid of hindrances in the process.
Final thoughts
As you can see, the business entities’ lifecycle entails an ongoing loop of improvement. Collecting data at each stage and from each entity and sharing it across the process lifecycle is key to establishing an effective BPM framework. Automation solutions like Workflow Engine can radically simplify these tasks and help you orchestrate your processes in the most efficient way.
