The world of process management and automation can be difficult to navigate. Companies are under increasing pressure to be more efficient and deliver results.

, 57% of respondents said that effective decision-making was most important to them, yet the processes used often don't support the team to make effective and accurate decisions.

BPM and BPA are two different technologies that can help companies better structure and 

. While they may seem similar, both technologies accomplish vastly different goals.

(BPM) is an organizational discipline that allows a company to get a bird’s eye view of all the processes in their company and update them accordingly. BPM tools aim to give the company clarity around who is doing what, and when, so the company as a whole can work together with more alignment.

There are many different ways companies attempt to get this comprehensive

. Some popular methods of mapping out processes include methods like kanban boards, post-it notes, spreadsheets, or even brainstorming processes onto paper. While these methods can help conceptualize the ideal process with stakeholders, it's also static and prone to errors.

 is very effective in helping managers and employees have clarity around each and every one of their processes. Companies that know what their processes are and manage them accordingly are more likely to build a business model that is both practical and scalable.

BPA or business process automation, on the other hand, involves automating steps in the process to take the burden off managers. Instead of outlining a static process on paper and performing the management tasks manually (like sending emails, chat messages, and creating documents and pages), 

can take the brunt of these tedious and repetitive tasks.

Process automation software has traditionally involved coding expertise from the IT department, which remained out of reach for many. In recent times, process automation solutions have actually become more attainable for more than just enterprise businesses. Technological advances and the pandemic have caused automation to become more mainstream, starting a digital revolution for many businesses.

 creates more efficiency and productivity within the organization. Managers can focus more on daily tasks that require critical thinking, rather than copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another or writing yet another email. Instead of static processes that live on paper, automation makes process management more dynamic and adaptable.

BPM vs BPA: which one is best for your business?

While many companies have implemented some kind of BPM system, many are yet to implement automation. 

can feel especially daunting for many businesses, but it is an important step toward creating a work environment that functions more cohesively.

Business process management tools can help your company know its processes better, but automation takes you to the next level. Automation is the difference between having a process and ensuring that process is followed.

provide you with both BPM and BPA that are easy to set up. Instead of setting up each automation manually, which can take hours, FireStart has automations built-in. What's more, the drag and drop interface means you don't have to code anything to get started.

Automation is key to improving both company and employee productivity.

Start automating your key processes

Processes have come a long way from post-it notes on a whiteboard.

BPM and BPA are two very different technologies. In the age of process automation software, companies are automating their processes before even mapping them out. Using BPM and BPA together ensures that everyone is always on the same page and the business is running smoother than ever.

With all the new tools and technologies available, it's difficult to make the right decision for your business. BPM and BPA solutions can help you to better understand the processes that drive your business. Knowing the difference between them and how to best use them is your recipe for business success.

BPM vs BPA: Which Is Best For Your Business?

Businesses run best when they are efficient. Too often, employees are unable to do their best job because of process confusion. This confusion over tasks in the process leads to missed deadlines, ineffective process cycles, and wasted time.

Many businesses often shift business process management to the backburner. To understand the importance of defining your business processes, it’s important to understand the fundamental role of BPM within your organization.

 enables organizations to clearly see where resources are going and what the ROI is. Executives can have a clear overview of all the resources that circulate around the business, while managers can operate from a single source of truth for their teams. Even employees gain the benefit of knowing exactly who to go to for which task. So no matter how many platforms you may have 

Why is business process management important?

Knowing and defining your processes for your entire business can seem daunting, but it’s well worth the effort. Business process management helps your business to operate transparently with all stakeholders, meaning that everyone knows their tasks without wasted time or confusion.

Knowing your processes helps your business to:

, then you’ve opened your business up to a world of exciting new opportunities to make everything more efficient, like introducing process automation and high-level orchestration. Without a clear overview of the processes and tasks that make your business run, and the people that execute them, it’s incredibly difficult to introduce automation that will work in the long term.

All businesses want to be more efficient, yet the road to efficiency can be unclear. Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) can face even more difficulties due to a lack of resources when compared with enterprise counterparts.

Improving overall efficiency starts with 

. Ensuring that processes are clear, defined, and assigned ensures that everyone in the company knows where they stand in each process. Defining business processes also helps SMBs to ascertain which processes are necessary, and which ones can be improved. Over time, data from your processes can clearly show where bottlenecks are and where they can be improved.

Communication and collaboration are at the heart of every business. A company after all is made up of people. When multiple people are involved in a process, it can quickly become convoluted and confusing, especially when you don’t have a central, visual map of who does what, when. 

Building digital processes helps teams collaborate better together on tasks, gives managers a clear overview of who is handling which task, and assists stakeholders so they can have a good overview of how the business is running. Streamlining the communication between departments also saves time by eliminating the need for multiple meetings or long email chains.

, errors can arise. Employees can quickly have their week eaten up by correcting mistakes, leading to lost time and fewer resources.

Working with process management software helps your business reduce mistakes by eliminating tedious spreadsheets, and keeping everyone on a digital single source of truth.

With the disruption from the pandemic, SMBs have seen the advantages of digitizing, even if they weren’t necessarily ready for it. Small businesses often had to grapple with quickly implementing different digital technologies in order to keep up. In the midst of the chaos, business process management was shifted to the side, which puts SMBs in a precarious position. 

Businesses can benefit from taking another look at their process ecosystem to see where improvements can be made. Digitizing all your business processes can help set your company up for the future, ensuring that disruptions are minimized. This type of future-proofing makes the company more resilient in the post-pandemic world.

Business process management may sound complex, but in reality it's the process of streamlining the daily tasks that you do so you can be more efficient. Optimizing your process ecosystem not only helps your businesses’ bottom line but also helps each employee stay on task.

Businesses around the world gain back hours each week to spend on decision-making and creative thinking by utilizing process management. Over time, your business will have accomplished even more than you thought possible, without all the tedious tasks.

Drive efficiency in your organization

Building processes that last are more important than ever for your business post-pandemic.

Pandemic-proof your workflows with effective business process management. BPM helps to build good process cycles and help your company reach its highest goals.

Business process management (BPM) is the foundational step towards building workflows that support your company. Although its often misunderstood or left to the side, BPM can drastically change how you conduct your business for the better.

Why Business Processes Are Important

So what exactly is business process standardization? Process standardization is the act of making all processes within the company unified and ultimately, replicable. Standardization for each important process ensures that everyone in the organization is only performing one, true version of the process so that miscommunication is avoided.

Process standardization helps your business to identify the many ways a process is being done. As the saying goes, without awareness, nothing can change in the organization. Creating more awareness and transparency around your processes means that the company can now begin to solve the scattered ways of working, and align everyone on one clear way forward.

IT process standardization has many benefits:

In the past, communicating how to perform a certain process was done extremely manually. It involved paper, pens, and sticky notes, along with email chains and further wasted resources. With the revolution of remote working during the pandemic, this way to reform processes is not only inefficient, but it’s also not possible with 

Mapping and modeling your processes digitally is more of a necessity than ever. Digital process organization allows remote and in-house colleagues to collaborate together, making the uptake of the new process easier and quicker. It’s all about removing the friction associated with change.

Start standardizing your business processes

In the pandemic, speed and efficiency matter more than ever. Businesses are now more concerned with scale and growth in order to survive in an uncertain world. What’s more, standard business processes also make your company more resilient, meaning that 

sudden changes won’t completely disrupt the entire business.

In your daily work, making business processes uniform and repeatable means you will be able to balance multiple priorities and demands without constantly losing time in small details. Standardized business processes allow you to see what is absolutely essential, helping you to be more effective. 

that standardization is one of the key factors of success in the post-pandemic world.

Don’t waste any more time and resources, start standardizing!

Review all the existing mutations you have for one core process and gather the relevant stakeholders. It’s important to gain a complete overview of how the process is functioning right now.

The team you have assembled can begin working to create a unified “best practice” process for this scenario, taking into account the different variations. Often, variations occur from a lack of transparency. Once everyone is discussing the process, these variations are easy to identify and correct.

you’re able to model the process digitally

, without needing to use pens and paper. This can be especially ideal 

 since even after the meeting they will be able to access the process in the cloud.

Step 2: Assign roles for each step in the process

For each task in the process, assign a relevant role. It’s often the case that within a company, processes run on autopilot, meaning that there is a lack of transparency in the wider team around who is responsible for what. Keeping tabs on who does what is essential for reaching the organization’s higher goals. Success starts on the micro-level.

Assigning roles also ensures that tasks won’t sit unattended, costing the team more time which can result in missed deadlines.

To keep tabs on who is completing what task, 

FireStart allows you to assign roles, not people.

 So if one employee is on holiday, another employee in that role can claim it. For example, if you have a task that needs to be done by an HR professional, you can assign that task to your HR team to make sure that the task will definitely get done. When someone from the HR team claims the task, the rest of the team will be notified to avoid double-work.

Step 3: Communicate and implement the new process

With your roles and tasks defined, you can now make the process live. Previously, this would involve lengthy email chains or virtual meetings. With FireStart, you can simply invite all the stakeholders to FireStart Cloud to show them exactly what the new process is, and where they contribute.

A big part of change management is making the change as natural as possible. This is why FireStart makes it so easy for your teams. You can use FireStart as your central information hub, opening it each morning to see what tasks need to be done, or being reminded of new tasks via email or platforms like Microsoft Teams.

Part of any new change is monitoring the success. Over time, you will gain new insights into how the process is working for your organization and identify ways to iterate and change.

FireStart makes this part of the equation easy by making it simple for teams to collaborate remotely to update the process when improvements can be made. You can also lock workflows to make sure that no one can make changes without consulting the team first.

Ultimately, an organization with a streamlined process ecosystem will naturally be more resilient than one with disjointed processes.

IT process standardization empowers companies to:

Standardization helps minimize resource waste and manage process quality, setting realistic expectations for departments and 

Discover the important of well-formed business processes

Future-proof your processes for resiliency

Discover how simple it is to begin standardizing your process ecosystem and why it's important.

Process standardization is the act of making all processes within the company unified and ultimately, replicatable. Standardization for each important process ensures that everyone in the organization is only performing one, true version of the process so that miscommunication is avoided.

Standardization has become a business buzzword, especially since the pandemic. Companies everywhere are looking for ways to make their businesses run smoother, which involves making easily replicatable processes.

How to Standardize Business Processes

Accurately managing your processes can be difficult. Companies often have to grapple with unwieldy processes because there has 

not been enough time or resources to standardize them

. This leaves many organizations with processes that are inefficient and end up wasting even more time and resources.

, it’s necessary to take a look at what exactly business processes are and how to best manage them.

Business processes are a set of structured steps or tasks that empower teams to achieve their goals. Processes are usually designed with many stakeholders involved in order to ensure that every step of the process is documented in a realistic manner.

In a nutshell, a business process creates transparency throughout the whole organization. Employees know what tasks they are doing when, and the management can see that the processes are helping the company achieve its targets.

After the processes in your ecosystem have been

, the processes have to be continually managed and updated. Business process management or BPM is an organizational discipline that allows a company to get a bird’s eye view of all the processes in their company and update them accordingly.

In the past, processes were recorded in an analog fashion using paper, sticky notes, and pens. These days, business 

 is used to keep track of company processes and optimize them.

Digitally recording your processes ensures that nothing will ever get lost and that the processes can be shared, collaborated on, and updated according to the real-time changes at work.

Why is it important to manage your processes?

Digitally managing your process ecosystem can 

 When processes are left unorganized, not formally defined, or improperly communicated to the team, it can be a huge drain on resources and lead to wasted time, missed deadlines, and added frustration.

Creating a business process from scratch may seem daunting, but with these simple steps, business process management can be easy, enjoyable, and effective.

Design your process by firstly mapping out the ideal process and then modeling it visually. In this phase, you should clearly define the tasks in the process and the roles that will be assigned to each task.

In FireStart, this process is made easy with the 

Drag and drop your tasks into the workflow and then assign roles to each task. The roles in FireStart can be assigned to a whole team, so you don’t have to worry about minute details like which specific people will handle each task.

The deployment phase turns your process into a workflow. When a process is active and running, it becomes a 

. In this phase, it’s important to test and see the effectiveness of your workflow. If tasks are missing or some stakeholders have been left out, now is the time to add them in before rolling out the process to the whole department.

With FireStart, running workflows is really very simple. All you have to do is hit the “Start Workflow” button in the corner and the workflow will run automatically when new data is added. For example, in an HR process when a new candidate applies for a job, the workflow will automatically start to collect the resume and notify the HR manager.

Step 3: Monitor your process for optimization

Over time, the process needs may change or you may identify bottlenecks. Monitoring the processes on a regular basis allows your team to be even more effective and more productive.

In FireStart, you can monitor workflows at a glance in the “Workflows” tab. Check in to see where your workflows may be getting stuck to improve the process. We always suggest automating tasks where possible to avoid manual tasks.  This is what’s called business process automation and it can speed up your process cycle times so you can make the most of your team’s resources!

Learn how to standardize your processes for seamless implementation.

Want to start implementing business processes?

Business Process Management (BPM) can improve company efficiency and boost employee morale.

Stay on top of your processes by managing them digitally. Business process management is an important step to making your company more agile and responsive in response to remote working. Keep your processes in the cloud so they can grow with your business as you scale.

Whether you're an enterprise or small to medium business, process management can be a challenge. Fortunately, there are software platforms and tools that can help any size business keep track of its processes.

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