The 4 best enterprise BPM solutions

The key to long-lasting success in business is the ability to evolve. No matter what product or service a company provides, there will come a time when it needs to make changes to its processes. Enterprise business process management (BPM) describes the continuous work of discovering, analyzing, and improving those processes to bring more value to the customer.

Using enterprise BPM to continually improve your business is a lot like getting regular exercise to improve your physical health. You exercise to keep your body healthy and running at top efficiency — but you can’t just exercise to reach one goal and stop there. You have to keep working out to maintain what you’ve achieved and continue improving.

Similarly, businesses must keep improving their processes each and every day to stay competitive in the market. Incorporating the principles of enterprise BPM into each process can help make that happen. BPM isn’t just one set of rules or guidelines to improve profits — it’s a philosophy you can apply to just about anything your business does.

Overview of enterprise BPM

The journey toward better business processes starts with discovery. To know what your business can improve and how to improve it, you must first know everything about the processes in question.

Often, we ignore processes that seem to be working fine without actually analyzing their effectiveness and efficiency. Taking the initiative to better understand them delivers a significant benefit: insight.

The principles of BPM require you to map out processes (everything from document and database management to approvals) and, through that work, align them more closely with your business goals. This can mean streamlining a process, making it more robust, or simply swapping it out altogether for something else. The point is, you won’t know exactly what and how to improve until you can map each process out.

The benefits of leveraging BPM software

After identifying the changes you need to make in your business process management, the right enterprise BPM software solution can make process management much easier for the stakeholders involved.

BPM software tools are ubiquitous among companies that practice BPM. The solutions typically include these features:

• A workflow management system
• A system for creating business rules and conditions that govern BPM
• The ability to create online forms to distribute to stakeholders involved in each process
• Analytics to judge the effectiveness of BPM
• Options for integrations with other software, like point-of-sale (POS) interfaces (e.g., Shopify and Salesforce)

BPM software can help businesses reduce errors and waste as well as increase productivity. But it’s not all about directly impacting overhead and profit. BPM can help provide clarity about what goals businesses want to achieve, so they can allocate resources to achieve those goals while also setting standards for daily processes to keep everything on track.

Top four enterprise BPM solutions

If your company is looking to give your processes a boost, here are some top services that provide BPM solutions.

1. Jotform

Jotform is the right solution for businesses looking for an all-in-one enterprise BPM service. Its suite of services, including Jotform Tables and Jotform Approvals, can help businesses improve their processes by automating a wide variety of tasks like database management and expense approval. Jotform also provides templates for everything from tables to PDFs, so it’s equipped to work with many vital business processes.

Jotform Enterprise, a digital workplace productivity tool, can help your business incorporate BPM — and since Jotform offers more than 400 integrations, you can continue using the software you’re already familiar with.

2. Appian

An old-school solution initially launched in the late 1990s, Appian lets businesses build apps to automate processes by creating a workflow diagram. Appian helps simplify complex workflows without requiring an in-house development team to build apps from the ground up. However, it’s the most mature offering in the BPM solution marketplace, so there are more up-to-date options available.

3. Pega Platform

Also known as PegaSystems, Pega Platform is an enterprise BPM tool for businesses looking to improve customer relationship management (CRM), case management, automation, and other important aspects of a business. Some users, though, have reported difficulties in learning how to use the program, as there’s a learning curve required to understand the development process of Pega Platform’s BPM solutions.

4. Nintex Platform

A highly rated BPM software in its own right, the Nintex platform is a good choice for businesses that want to implement automation for advanced workflows, process mapping, and online forms. Users can also create documents based on contracts and work orders using Nintex’s DocGen features. However, Nintex can be pricey for small companies since the cost is based on the number of workflows you generate instead of the number of users you have.

The next step to a thriving business

Working on yourself isn’t always easy — and that’s doubly true for businesses with dozens (or hundreds) of employees and stakeholders to consider. Executing business process management properly requires buy-in from everyone. But, when you do it right, BPM can have a transformational impact on the way your company does business.

Take the time to find the right enterprise BPM solution for you and discover how more efficient and convenient workflows can empower your team.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska