Top Innovations in Business Processes Across U.S. Industries

In the beginning, simple flow charts were used for most business process models. These pictures show a very structured order of tasks that doesn't change much. Flow maps are a great way to make sure that steps in a very regulated process are always carried out the same way.As the field grew, BPM system vendors realized that in real life, most processes don't always follow the same exact set of steps," said Donncha Carroll, a partner at Axiom Consulting Partners who leads the firm's data science center of excellence and works on revenue growth.For example, an enterprise software vendor's onboarding process for new customers may be different based on the type of users, how complicated the software needs to be set up, and how well it needs to work with other systems. The order of the steps in this hiring process would change in ways that were not known at the beginning.

With adaptive process management unknown factors that become clear during the process completion can be dealt with

Users can already model both organized and unstructured business processes with tools like Oracle Integration Cloud. As these BPM systems get smarter, they will also be used as a layer of management, calling on a wide range of other apps, from old ones like legacy tools to new ones like RPA software or licensed ones like ERP systems.In the beginning, BPM was mostly about how processes moved data between systems of record. Better BPM features will make it easier to improve the ways that systems of interaction work with processes.Anthony Macciola, chief innovation officer at Abbyy, thinks that companies will use business process management (BPM) more for tracking front-end processes than for back-end systems as they see better customer and employee experiences as a key competitive differentiator.This is going to make things better for both customers and employees. AI, chatbots, and interactive mobile apps are making it easier for customers and employees to connect with businesses in more ways. As a result, BPM will continue to focus on front-end processes.John Blankenbaker, principal data scientist at SSA & Company, a global management consulting company, thinks that the most important change for BPM will be the arrival of automated process discovery.The first version of process mining tools looked at log files from a single important system, like an ERP platform, to see which business units viewed and changed which data. This helped companies get a picture of what their employees were doing. These days, this method includes putting together the actions of many systems to see how data moves within a company.

This gives a full picture of how things work

Traditional methods like talks and observations are still needed to find out what the people involved in a process do when they're not online. Keyloggers and location trackers can record more physical tasks, though, as more steps of a process move online.It's hard to turn a list of events into a process plan that makes sense. It's helpful that most work tasks are pretty much the same. The names of things are the most important changes. Blankenbaker thinks that machine learning methods that look for recurring patterns will get better. This will help make sure that different naming conventions for similar processes work better together. This will help you understand the process better and figure out how to make it work better.BPM will be used more because more platforms are being put in place so that businesses can get most of their IT from a single vendor, said Isaac Gould, research manager at Nucleus Research, an IT advice service. "BPM functionality will soon become widely available to both SMBs and large enterprises alike."A lot of big software companies, like Oracle, Workday, Salesforce, Microsoft, and SAP, already have BPM built into their systems. Businesses will not need to look for BPM-specific solutions as much as they used to because of the rise of low-code development platforms and interaction platforms.

Organizations undergoing a digital transformation initiative should consider the BPM functionality and roadmap of their prospective technology platforms

Gould.At first, BPM software only made it easy to make process maps and diagrams. It was up to developers to actually carry out these process designs. This made things take longer and caused issues when maps and apps weren't in line.Dana Daher, a senior research analyst in the CIO group at Info-Tech Research Group, said, "BPM cannot stand alone like it has in the past."AI, machine learning, and robotic process automation (RPA) are being used more and more in business processes to make them more efficient. This is called intelligent business process automation. Over time, these smart tools will use data to give them more information.People who work on business software write code to make these features easier and faster for people who use them. In the 1970s, I worked for a service bureau that did accounting for a number of Washington State offices of the count assessor and treasurer. Back then, they used mag tape to store their info. You can put 5 reels in and take them out, and you can use 9-inch floppies to handle transactions. Each tape and floppy took 20 minutes to process. I changed the database so that it uses a varying number of years of back taxes instead of a fixed set. This is because only about 3% of the database had back taxes. The whole information fit on one tape, and the nightly process for that one tape took twenty minutes. That one simple change took about an hour of honest work.