By Nicole Laurier, @NicoleLaurier

Back in March, I read an article in Redmond by Don Jones titled ‘What’s Your Time Worth?’. Don discusses the challenges of getting a business to understand the value of automating a process and how to show ROI (return on investment) to your employer to add this type of third party tool.

That’s a very interesting concept (and a great article!) but very often a mid size business does not have an internal IT department, so they have probably not come across Business Process Management Software or even heard the terminology. And so they will not realize how their business will benefit by adding this type of software application to their current systems.

Going back to basics, what is the definition of Business Process Management? According to Wikipedia:

‘It promotes business effectiveness & efficiency, while striving for innovation, flexibility and integration with technology.’

[To learn how to cut your time in half by automating daily tasks, attend our webinar July 12th.]

So Business Process Management Software was designed and continues to evolve to automate companies manual business processes; to ensure that organizations are aware of what is happening in their internal systems; to notify business owners of critical company information; to handle daily, weekly or monthly reporting; to integrate disparate business systems so that the same information does not have to be re-keyed twice.

I know the description above is a little bit vague, some real life examples of typical Customer requirements are:

~ Credit Control Procedures

~ Purchase Order Approvals

~ Handling of orders that come in from an e commerce Store

~ E-Mail Archiving

~ Handling Literature Requests from a website

~ Reports to Management of new sales

And there are so many other processes that could be added to this list.

Ask yourself ‘do you want your employees to manually handle the same task on a daily basis if their time could be better spent? Do you want them engaged in labor intensive, repetitive  processes where errors can easily be made? I am sure your answer is NO!

So what other key benefits do businesses gain by adding a Business Process Management Solution? Not only do you free up your employees time, but your business becomes more efficient, you know what is going on in your internal systems and best of all you will quickly see the ROI from your investment.

Interestingly business often purchase this type of application to use for just one process but once they have that in place, they realize all the other process that can benefit.

The hardest part is to define what are your process needs; once you have done that you are halfway to solving your business problem and ready to look at the solution.

Do you have a manual process that is taking up too much of your employees time? Do you want to discover how your business can benefit by adding Business Process Management?

The question is ‘What do you want to Automate?’