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Processes should never be left in their place once installed - they may become outdated over time and need regular reviewing to assess if they still work effectively and find ways to make them even more efficient if necessary.
A business process analysis review can be an extremely beneficial exercise that helps increase revenue, enhance growth and streamline operations - something no tool alone could achieve.
What Is Business Process Analysis (BPA)?
BPA (Business Process Analysis) is an analytical tool for reviewing and improving business processes. A process consists of multiple steps or tasks repeated repeatedly during workflow to produce one specific result - this might include something as basic as new employee onboarding procedures or reviewing quarterly goals; other examples could be the planning session decision-making process or reviewing meetings' records and goals.
BPAs are part of Business process management (BPM), the practice of overseeing and improving business processes.
A business analyst will review your existing processes to see if they're still functional or if upgrades need to be made; create a template for future management needs of business process analysis.
Business Analysis And Business Process Analysis
BPA differs from business analyses in that its focus solely lies on processes. Business analyses analyze all facets of an organization.
A BPA may be needed, for instance, to enhance the tracking process for finances. Your team's business analyst will review all actions taken by them to manage budgets, purchases, and revenues effectively; full business analysis could also be utilized if profitability analysis is of paramount concern to you.
Why Conduct A Business Process Analysis?
The impact of business process analysis on your company can be huge. A robust analysis goes beyond the inputs and outputs to identify your core values and where you can improve.
Business process analysis can provide you with a number of benefits:
- Find Gaps: Business Process Analysis (BPA) will show you the missing links within your key operations. These gaps can have a direct impact on your bottom line.
- List all Resources Available: A BPA will help you decide when to refuse a project. Similar to capacity planning, it outlines the resources available for every process. You'll know how much work you can handle and what resources are available.
- Align New Business Processes with the Current Climate and Culture: Cultural or environmental changes can have a significant impact on your business processes. Consider the COVID-19 epidemic. The teams first had to decide how they would manage the remote team and then return safely to their office. There were many stops and starts in between. BPAs allow you to implement a new procedure when needed.
- Reducing Redundancies and Inefficiencies will help you to Avoid Bottlenecks: According to our research, in 2021, knowledge workers spent an average of 129 hours doing duplicate work. What a waste of time! BPAs can help improve your processes to eliminate or reduce duplicate work. You can decrease the amount of work you do by identifying opportunities for adding reusable templates and automating your processes.
- Increase Employee Adoption: Better processes will be used by more employees. You can show your employees you are interested in their work by regularly analyzing processes.
- Improve Your flow of Process: In the end, you should be able to change your processes along with your workload. BPAs help you create better processes for your business.
Business Process Analysis: The Five Steps
It will require some adjustments to implement a cycle of business process analyzes in your organization. You won't manage most BPAs directly unless you are a business analyst.
You may want to outsource this or create an in-house position to supervise it, depending on the needs of your company. No matter how BPAs are launched in your business, following these steps will help them take root and flourish.
Examine How Your Process Fits Into The Larger Picture
All of your processes should be tied to bigger initiatives and goals. The processes of your company are how you achieve goals.
They should also be connected to your business's "why." For instance, if the vision of your company is to provide everyone with easier access to health care, then every process should reflect this.
Your BPA begins with a review of existing processes to determine how they relate to workflows, departments, and, ultimately, the long-term objectives that will support your business mission.
Make a template for business Process management
Gather Information About What Is Happening Right Now
The data collection stage is next. You need to understand how your processes work before you can analyze them. It is best to speak with those who are most familiar with them.
Interviewing key stakeholders and creating surveys is a good way to start. You can also review KPIs. It will take more time to complete this process step than the others, but you'll be able to gain a better understanding of your process.
If you want to know how the product team triages and assesses their backlogs, you should interview those developers.
You should also look at key performance indicators for current processes. For example, how many items are left in the backlog following an Agile sprint?
Data Analysis And Mapping
It's now time to analyze. You'll need to collect all the data you have, such as:
- The process is divided into several steps.
- Relevant process diagrams.
- Members of the Associated Team.
- Success Metrics and KPIs.
Business process mapping can be used to visualize your workflows and processes. This makes it easier for you to evaluate them.
You can use process mapping to create flowcharts or visual maps of current steps and sequences so that you better understand processes. This layout makes it easier to spot patterns in the process flow.
Find Areas For Improvement
You will identify gaps and redundancies during the analysis phase. This is where you should focus your efforts. Let's assume, for example, that your analysis revealed developers spend three days planning the sprint backlog.
You realize that the delays are due to different time zones after interviewing stakeholders and analyzing meeting schedules. The new technology that encourages asynchronous communications would be able to make communication easier and save time for this team.
Changes Are Made
BPI is the place where you put into practice all that you have learned. BPIs will help you adapt your business processes and increase profitability after your BPA.
The BPA will help you discover your company's processes. This information can be used to make changes to these processes or to create them.
What Is The Difference Between Business Process Analysis (BPA) and Business Analysis (BA)?
One could easily get confused between Business Process Analysis (BPA) and Business Analysis (BA), two areas within business Process management that may create some confusion over their distinctions.
They both focus on analysis, but each has unique focus areas: BPA is concerned with process modeling and analysis, while BA is used to examine larger business operations landscapes and can focus on different aspects such as budgets, financial forecasting, or cost estimation.
Business Process Analysis: Benefits
Business process analysis is a powerful tool that can optimize your daily business processes and align them with strategic goals.
BPA is a great tool for SME business:
- Improve the Efficiency of Existing Processes: The BPA improves the time to value for application. The BPA also reduces the time required for operational workflows, such as onboarding employees and patient or customer ingestion processes.
- Reveal Issues with Capacity: In every process, there can be a limit on resources. BPA can identify where capacity limits are, what impact they have on the process, and ways to improve them. Scaling is an important consideration. You may find that the digital platforms and tools you use limit your organization's current needs. BPA will help you determine the changes that you should make to align your business impact with its growth.
- Clarify Rules and Policies: As organizations adopt more digital devices and move towards remote working, there is a misalignment in the security of these devices. This analysis will help identify ways to speed up IT approvals and ensure uniform security policies.
- Improve Governance: Risk Management is becoming a higher priority in business. Maintaining compliance is expensive for businesses, but it's even more so when problems arise. Analysis of business processes can show where compliance has failed. Your organization might not be in compliance with the auditing frequency of application security. BPA will set up an improvement plan that takes into account compliance and resource needs in order to make sure a process is able to be implemented and maintained.
- Cost Savings can be Identified by BPA: The cost savings achieved by organizations that use digital workflows and have reduced the amount of human error, as well as time spent searching for documents, is a great example.
- Resolve Bottlenecks: Bottlenecks are caused by siloed channels of communication, planning, and implementation. Business process analyses can reveal communication problems and help resolve obstructions in the approval process.
- Improve Deployment and Release Process: Effective processes lead to smoother deployments and releases.
- Enhance Integration and Adoption Process: Adopting new technologies across a department or enterprise is also a massive undertaking. BPA implements processes that include training and visual representations of workflows to support adoption.
- Improve Company Culture: Cleaning up the house is one way to improve your process. These improvements bring new energy to the employee experience every day. This results in better internal engagement and morale. Customers will be more engaged and have a positive impression of your company if you optimize processes, such as improving the website experience or customer service.
Business Process Analysis: Methodologies
Business Process Analysis (BPA), as a methodology, is guided by two main philosophies:
- Six Sigma is a method.
- Learn Six Sigma.
Six Sigma is the five to seven-step methodology used by most companies today to analyze efficiencies and constraints.
Lean Six Sigma is slightly different in that it combines the Six Sigma method with Lean. This collaborative approach focuses on eliminating resources and tasks that do not provide defined value.
Consider the detail inherent in each step to get a better understanding of how an analysis of business processes is performed.
BPA generally follows the following structure:
- Define: Start with identifying processes that you wish to analyze. These are the first places you will see a problem. The process analysis may begin with diagrams of each step. Analysts start with existing processes. They examine formal and informal processes, such as processes that are documented and those specific to the culture of an organization.
- Next: Evaluate the performance of your process in relation to defined metrics. The next step will also help to improve KPI metrics. The business process management platform can measure its processes using KPIs if these are clearly defined first. The KPIs are efficiency and effectiveness indicators, as well as quality, productivity indicators, profitability indicators, and value indicators. Also included are indicators of competitiveness and capacity. Customer engagement workflows, for example, could be evaluated by efficiency metrics compared to quality or effectiveness.
- Analysis: There are a variety of different analysis techniques. Each one has a specific purpose. Business process analysts may perform a value or gap analysis. Each of these analytical techniques includes a set of specific steps. The gap analysis shows what is missing from the process. Value analysis reveals what's valuable in the process and, therefore, what waste is. Root cause analysis is a method that uses "why" and other methods to help find the cause of a problem.
- Improving: Business Process Managers collaborate with Analysts to develop and implement plans which improve problematic areas. Re-mapping processes, boosting resources, and changing communication channels are all examples of improvements. This can also be a very detailed step, which can include a wide range of improvement methods.
- Control: After a thorough analysis, the last step is to control the new processes and standards. The analysis can be used by decision-makers to manage resource allocation, roles, processes for hiring, and administrative, executive, or IT processes. The stakeholders also track these changes, and they set time-markers for future analyses.
Business Process Analysis: When And How To Use It
Business process analysis can provide an effective means of pinpointing the causes behind undesirable results and making necessary improvements in processes.
Implementation of business process analysis will depend on your goals for the business. A culture that values employee problem-solving and improvements as part of its core can greatly boost morale, turnover reduction, and customer experience - whether this occurs formally or informally - thus being key components in creating improved morale, reduced turnover rates, and providing superior customer experiences.
Regardless if formal tools such as Business Process Analyzer are utilized or simply done regularly through informal audits such as quarterly checks, process auditing must become part of every organization.
Analysis of existing processes is the foundation of business process analysis (BPA), often using business process mapping - an invaluable visual aid and document that you can utilize for this process.
Your organization can then utilize these records and insights gained during BPA to craft an improvement plan using them - often producing flowcharts with enhanced process flows as part of this plan.
Business process analysis refers specifically to your operations as an organization; it doesn't examine non-process-related areas of a company.
Instead, this discipline acts as your guide toward optimizing all operational areas within it.
BPA can be found in the following examples:
- Employee onboarding should be reviewed to ensure alignment with the business culture for better engagement.
- Analysis of marketing processes is necessary to determine if metrics and paths are aligned with the key performance indicators. For example, how customers convert or how many leads engage with your company.
- Discovering inefficiencies in the technology adoption process.
Business Process Analysis Tools
Analysts often turn to process diagrams in order to visualize inputs and outputs, task sequences, and subprocesses nested within main processes.
Analysts also utilize the software for creating and mapping workflows. Software available that automates Business Process Analyses allows organizations to model end-to-end processes, enabling analysts to easily determine where a process begins and ends, thus helping determine its start/stop point.
BPA relies heavily on process modeling and mapping. Two techniques organizations often turn to when they want to enhance operations are Business Process Model Notation Diagramming (BPMN), and Supplier, Input Process Output Customer (SIPOC) diagrams.
Both of these visual tools help organizations visualize changes within processes while at the same time training employees effectively.
Who Is Responsible For Business Process Analysis (BPA)?
At this stage, it may be useful to assess who in your organization should take on responsibility for BPA. Given limited resources in an SME environment, an external business analyst consultant might provide the ideal solution.
Businesses often employ Business Process Analysts and Process Architects to conduct process analyses within their organizations.
While both titles refer to similar positions, each may work alongside either Business Architects, division leaders, and executives as necessary.
Business process analysis relies heavily on subject matter experts - this could include employees, consultants, or stakeholders like analysts, data scientists, quants, or IT administrators.
Automation And BPA
Hyper Automation has been deemed one of the top priorities for enterprise companies. Gartner forecasts that this industry will grow to $600 billion in 2022.
The amount of manual intervention is steadily reduced by hyper automation to create a responsive, fully automated process.
You may wish to ask specific questions about automating your processes:
- Why do you want to automate certain areas?
- What are the most common mistakes made by manual workers or policies misapplied?
- What are the high-volume and expensive processes?
- Have you identified any obvious problems with your organization's processes?
- What causes customer dissatisfaction?
BPA (Business Process Analysis) is a tool that can be used to create a mapped, documented path for your company in order to integrate automated processes.
This will help you move towards hyper automation. Hyper Automation is one of the ways service centers can optimize customer care and lower costs by moving from hybrid chatbots to fully automated ones.
Small-To-Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) And BPA
What is the best way for SMEs to begin a business process analysis? Prioritize the most critical processes that have the greatest impact on your business.
Consider mapping out a process to automate.
Standardize the automation documentation, as well as your process documentation, across all departments. BPA can be used by IT to create a process map for the software security protocol for different roles.
This will help your company to manage and scale onboarding.
How Can You Conduct A Business Process Analysis?
Here are some of the most common tools and methods used by business analysts:
- Root Cause Analysis: Use the analysis to determine your process' foundation and make sure it is connected to larger company goals.
- SWOT Analysis: The acronym SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It can give you a better understanding of how well your processes work and what they could do to improve.
- Gap Analysis: The gap analysis shows you where your company's processes are lacking in comparison to its larger goals.
What Are The Tools You Should Use To Conduct A Business Process Analysis?
You need a tool to conduct Business Process Analysis that will keep your data all in one place.
This works best with a project manager, as you can automate your tasks, create reports and instantly send status updates. All stakeholders will be able to see BPAs in action in real time, as well as how they work with your other business process automations.
What Is The Best Time To Use Business Process Analysis?
There are various business processes that could benefit from continuous enhancement, but in certain circumstances, a BPA would provide greater advantages.
Best Business Process Analysis Are your processes outdated and obsolete? When productivity in certain departments decreases, or turnover increases dramatically.
Launching or restructuring your team to test its viability.
