Business Process Management software can bring huge benefits to retailers by optimizing their businesses. Let’s find out what is BPM and how can it be applicable in the domain of your retail company.
What is Business Process Management?
BPM, which stands for business process management, the main idea of which is to automate the business processes, therefore optimizing your business to the ever-changing rough business environment. BPM was developed from an older concept of business modeling. Now modeling became a part of BPM as one of the main steps in business process optimization.
Regardless of the industry, your business consists of successive processes. When business processes are poorly managed they can become chaotic, and this can lead to operational costs. To make your business more effective and profitable, you need to organize and document every step. All procedures should be documented and there should be a person responsible for every process.
BPM divides every single process into separate steps: designing, modelling, execution, analysis and optimization. This chain is endless and every time the process is finished, it should be analyzed. Of course, it is impossible to do it manually. This is where you can use modern technology to make your life much easier. BPM systems like BPM’online have many powerful tools that can help in acquiring a clear vision of your business processes. Check out https://www.bpmonline.com/crm-software for more information about retail BPM.
The role of a BPM system in retail
Inventory management requires greatamounts of information coming from different systems based on different criteria. Keeping stores is stock with the right product at the right time requires access to a variety of data to support complex decisions regarding the management of logistics and merchandising.
Products distribution and inventory management had made great strides in recent years. And, of course, there are solutions to succeed on these complicated tasks However, they don’t always link to one another leaving the merchandise allocators, inventory planners, warehouse distribution managers rely on manual office communication, “to do” lists and an ad-hoc data use.
Very often effective merchandise allocation is as good as the ability of each member to multitask and be good at developing and maintaining excel spreadsheets. To illustrate how business process management system can add value to this retail process, let’s have a look at a typical breakdown. Let’s say that one product has been discontinued and replaced by another due to some reasons. It can take several weeks until the final execution of this change is reflected in the stores, catalogs and websites. The merchandise allocator does all the necessary paper work and ina weak receives a phone call from store department manager saying that they have insufficient inventory. If the process isn’t documented properly and the responsible people don’t have visibility to what is happening at critical points, it will take a tremendous amount of efforts to find out where the breakdown has occurred in the process and determine how to fix it.
The main problems that a retail BPM can fix:
- Lack of process consistency and reliability
- Lack of process visibility
- Lack of proactive alerts and notifications
- Logistics mistakes, wrong product mix
- Lack of communication between departments
When responsible people don’t have a clear vision of what is going on, business processes become uncontrollable, which causes a significant productivity loss. You waste most of your time on fixing mistakes and trying to systemize huge chaotic amounts of data. This leads to the lack of process consistency and reliability, which can cause unexpected errors and delays during the process execution.
The benefits of using an online BPM system in retail
A smart business process management platform helps to increase collaboration between IT departments and business users, as well as apply best practicies into executable process models. You can create a model of the business process and then define a more efficient “to be” business model. It can improve retail business process performance, visibility and agility. For example, you are in charge of a large chain of stores and you experience trouble with logistics. A BPM system can help you find the optimal route of product delivery.
Business process software can provide you with synchronized updates to the merchandise database, replenishment system, distribution system, visual merchandising team and store operations.
The benefits of using a bpm platform:
- “To-be” process modelling
- Running “what-if simulation”
- Quick bottlenecks detection and their resolution
- Smart business process analysis
Once such “to-be” processes have been optimized, they can be rapidly deployed into executable business processes. BPM software makes IT staff more productive and shortens the implementation time compared to other approaches. BPM software solutions like BPM’online give you best-in-class approach to automate and streamline human and system task workflows.
Bpm software allows you to harvest, share and reuse best process practices, maximize productivity and efficiency, and decrease expenses. You can empower business users for the better processes change, as well as control and enable your organization to dynamically optimize the processes continuously. Besides, an online business process management gives you a huge opportunity to increase IT value through reusable process components.
BPM software tools give you a real-time visibility, which translates into smarter decisions and faster response. Business users can obtain visibility full overview of their business process performance. By automating and monitoring the processes, we can potentially see that significant improvements can be made in executing a process with fewer errors and delays.
BPM program allows you to sense and respond to changing conditions. Using online bpm software, you can mitigate risks and identify opportunities. In addition, it may help you to detect, correlate and respond in real-time events across the organization.
BPM provides business users with graphical tools to allow them to customize dashboard components and business event filters they want to monitor and manage.
