When business process transformation is implemented the right way, you spend less time on repetitive back-office tasks and outdated legacy systems. Business process transformation creates streamlined workflows and automated end-to-end systems where organizational resources go towards providing more value to customers, saving costs, and boosting operational efficiency.
In today's technologically charged world, successful business process transformation initiatives must be customer-focused and data-driven to create a well-oiled business machine that delivers consistent quality output and excellent product or service delivery using online and offline channels.
Business process transformation is a small part of the larger concept of business process management (BPM) — an organizational discipline using various methods to identify, streamline, automate, measure, and eliminate bloated business processes to create organizational growth.
Successful organizational transformation involves:
- Tearing apart old systems
- Creating new processes
- Implementing sustainable change
6 Steps to Implement Business Process Transformation
Though the benefits of business process transformation are significant, it's not always easy to convince stakeholders and employees to become invested in changing the existing processes to create better business outcomes. However, it's worth the effort to carry them along to increase your chances of a successful transformation initiative.
Are you ready to get started improving your current business processes? Follow the steps below to implement a successful organizational transformation.
1. Identify Areas in Need of Change, Elimination, or Optimization
Generally, business process improvement begins with business leaders getting together to rethink existing processes from scratch — from sourcing and creating your product or service to improving employee productivity and the end-customer experience. View your product from the customers' perspective and use this thinking to drive your process transformation methodology and execution.
Identify redundant tasks, outdated systems, and technology stacks, and get input from your project management teams to add the operational context of how projects and business operations run across different levels in your organization. Also, make sure to consider regulatory compliance in alignment with the new processes and business goals.
2. Gain Stakeholder Buy-In
Digital business transformation efforts may be met with resistance from stakeholders and employees who are used to the status quo.
Listen to their viewpoints and communicate the benefits of change using data. Explain the decision-making driving process changes, new business models, and business growth. Use financial terms where helpful and tie your organizational transformation to its main strategic goals.
Business process transformation isn’t implemented simply for the sake of change — it ensures your business continues to grow and innovate, creating even more efficient operating models.
3. Gather Experts and Collaborative Teams
Involve experts and leaders from different departments to create a comprehensive transformation and change management plan. Avoid silos of automation and transformation that do not connect new business processes end-to-end. Develop and analyze several process modeling samples and encourage feedback, support, and input from key stakeholders and employees.
4. Focus on Customer Needs
Your business process transformation efforts should always be driven from a customer experience approach. It is common for some organizations to fall into the IT and infrastructure modernization trap without adding any real value to customers.
Let's take a construction company undergoing business process transformation, for example. While the organizational transformation initiative may begin with a goal to reduce construction cycle time and enhance customer service delivery, the project may segue into redesigning its mobile application interface to be more engaging without improving the main functionalities users need.
5. Redesign Core Processes Using New Technologies
Your process transformation plan should include documentation of existing processes, technology requirements, infrastructure migration plans, and areas of training for employees.
It is wise to create a business process transformation transition plan to address how the organization will carry out normal business operations while implementing new processes. Communicate your transition plan organization-wide, giving a timeline for when different phases will be complete.
6. Define Key Performance Indicators
Your organizational transformation project is only as good as the metrics used to measure its progress and alignment with strategic goals. Establishing performance measures at the start and during various phases of your transformation initiative is critical for success. For many organizations, cost reduction, improved profits, and positive customer experiences are good indicators of business growth.
3 Approaches to Business Process Transformation
You may choose to implement your process transformation methodology and transition plan in the following three ways:
- Pilot: Your transformation initiatives are developed from the ground up, designing each new process carefully while existing processes and business operations continue uninterrupted. If the pilot works well, the entire organizational process is replaced with the new.
- Phased: In a phased approach, transformation teams implement new technologies within the existing organizational structure, developing new components in related departments as fast as possible.
- Cold turkey: Cold turkey is a radical redesign of the entire organization's existing processes at one go, leaving little room for error. Experienced business process managers must lead this transformation method to be successful.
10 Ways to Measure Your Business Process Transformation Strategy’s Success
Measuring business process transformation success depends on the strategic goals and metrics of each organization. Key organizational transformation metrics include:
- Improving customer experience and satisfaction
- Revenue attributed to new processes
- Increasing financial performance
- Enhanced operational efficiency
- Increased employee productivity and engagement
- Time saved by automation
- Impactful sustainability metrics
- Number of innovations brought to the market
- New leads and customer conversions
- Increased goodwill and reputation
How Pulpstream Helps Enterprises With Business Process Transformation
Pulpstream's digital transformation software is built to make business process transformation easy for organizations of all sizes. Whether you work in manufacturing, consulting, or technology, Pulpstream's no-code building blocks help create an engaging product or service experience, improving your employees’ and customers’ overall experience.
Here are four ways Pulpstream helps enterprises implement successful business process transformation.
Empower Employees
Pulpstream improves employee-focused processes by giving them more power to create no-code business solutions to enhance productivity and cross-team collaboration. From service and manufacturing workflows to human resource management and incident management, Pulpstream empowers teams to streamline, automate, and improve operational workflows and daily processes and get their jobs done faster.
Strengthen Workflows
Using Pulpstream, organizations can replace ad-hoc workflows and systems with more efficient tools and collaborative software. Pulpstream helps replace patched-up workflows with systems that can scale.
An example is replacing the sales teams' system of gathering leads using email and spreadsheets. In its place, Pulpstream provides a more efficient system that pulls the necessary information from emails and spreadsheets into an organized and accessible database for all sales members to work from any device, at any time.
Automate Processes
Pulpstream provides an interactive, customizable, and powerful tool to take control of your business processes. Deconstruct the employee and customer experience and eliminate all time-consuming, manual tasks that slow down service delivery and operational efficiency.
Create systems that support employees to do their best work with an integrated leave of absence management system or claims management. When employees and customers observe an organization making positive changes for their benefit, they are motivated to contribute more and spread happiness to customers.
Enhance Risk and Governance Processes
Partnering with Pulpstream also makes it easy to manage organizational compliance, health, and safety assessment processes following global standards and best practices.
By leveraging Pulpstream's power of digital transformation and automation, your organization can quickly improve accuracy in forecasting risks, generate insightful analysis, and track every corrective action to a successful closure.
A Pulpstream Business Process Transformation Example
Captive Resources, LLC, an independent consulting company providing risk management, claims advocacy, and other services, partnered with Pulpstream to modernize its mission-critical software servicing hundreds of consultants and clients and generating over $2 billion in annual insurance premiums.
"When you have approximately 400 independent field consultants reliant on the system for their paycheck, failures and outages are highly impactful," said Dave Netti, Senior Vice President of Risk Control for Captive Resources.
Their challenge was to modernize their systems to be robust enough to cater to a fast-scaling database while remaining intuitive enough for people of all cultural identities to use — from tech-savvy millennials and Gen Z to baby boomers. Platform stability and security were also top concerns to maintain customer confidentiality and data safety.
Most importantly, Captive Resources needed the new solutions to be easily customizable when it came to adjusting and performing business-critical functions such as data entry, merging, and analysis.
Using Pulpstream's no-code deployment experience, the business process transformation for Captive Resources took only four months to transition from patched workflows and obsolete legacy systems to a streamlined business process that eradicated data entry redundancies and significantly reduced service delivery time, allowing consultants to work on tablets from any location.
Start Small With a Specific Transformation Initiative
Are you ready to transform your business processes, improve product or service delivery, and boost your overall customer experience? Get started by requesting a free demo of Pulpstream's no-code solution or downloading our free e-book to achieve business process transformation with a no-code solution.
Using Pulpstream's built-in component library, flexible logic, customizable alerts, and rules, your organization is well on its way to creating new business processes, automating and monitoring progress while working from anywhere and from any device.
