Business Process Transformation - An Ultimate Guide for 2024

As part of their digital transformation strategies, enterprises reevaluate their technological needs and digitize their internal operations to remain competitive, sustainable, and resilient.

But CIOs constantly fine-tuning their digital initiatives also need to remember that for transformation to be truly impactful and successful, the focus should be on business process transformation.

A well-planned business process transformation involves aligning people, technology, and culture to fundamentally change how enterprises operate, meet new business goals, and deliver value to new customers.

What is Business Process Transformation?

Business process transformation is the comprehensive redesign and restructuring of business processes to achieve significant improvements in operational efficiency and agility. Business Process Transformation can be driven by a variety of factors, such as the need to reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, or increase competitiveness. It is more like reengineering the critical processes, functions, workflows, tools, and technologies to fit the business demands and accelerate the time-to-market.

Business Process Transformation involves radically changing the elements of your processes to meet new business goals. Usually, these new goals are centered around a new digital transformation implementation.

Most companies engage in business process transformation when they need to make a drastic update to existing processes. Using this process transformation methodology, you can modernize your processes, incorporate new technology, save costs, and better integrate your core systems.

Business process transformation is part of the larger concept of business process management (BPM).

“The entire concept can be boiled down to a simple formula: new business demands + updated technology systems + talent + culture change = business process transformation. To describe an organizational transformation as purely digital, you neglect and even negate the necessary culture shift required to sustain systematic change,” says Daragh Mahon, Forbes Council Member

Business process transformation follows similar steps to business process management but attempts to make bigger and more drastic changes.

1. Identify the goals of the transformation

Are you primarily trying to upgrade systems? Incorporate new technology? Adapt processes to a new organizational structure? What has caused the need?

2. Establish baseline metrics

Collect the data needed to show that your business process transformation will be successful. Think through cost, time, number of errors, and other metrics you can measure.

3. Bring in all stakeholders

Ask all those involved in the process for their feedback on what worked well in the prior process and what they expect out of the new one.

4. Map out the best scenario

Using a diagramming tool, create the ideal workflow path including human and system tasks that need to take place.

5. Implement in a testing environment

Use a BPM tool to create a mock process and see how it runs between people and data.

6. Set live and monitor

Include small teams at first to the new process and closely monitor the progress and any changes that need to happen for the process to succeed.

Challenges in Business Process Transformation

As with any huge paradigm shift, business process transformation creates a number of challenges that must be resolved in order to succeed.

1. Weak sponsorship engagement.

Throughout the entire lifecycle, from inception to development and deployment, you’ll need strong sponsorship from a person who will not only champion your requirements but also be patient enough to wait for the results to manifest. Without strong sponsorship, it can be more than a challenge to complete the transformation process.

2. Change in management practices 

Constantly changing management practices another challenge for business process transformation. As inefficient as your old process might have been, you will always have people who prefer “the way we used to do it”. As a part of implementing a business process transformation, you need to use good change management principles to bring everyone along.

3. Integration challenges 

Integration challenges can be significant in business process transformation. If you don’t choose the right BPM platform, you maybe very limited in what you can integrate with other software. You may realize from the beginning how challenging it will be to link to different platforms.

4. Missing key objectives 

To miss key objectives is a big challenge. Many business process transformation efforts end up only digitizing a process and have no noticeable effect on the efficiency of the process. Don’t settle for a dressed up version of your old business process. Make sure your successes are clearly defined.

When Should You Apply Business Process Transformation?

You should apply business process transformation in the following cases:

• When an existing process is not meeting the demands of the business
• When you have a significant number of errors in a process
• When you’ve updated the surrounding technology
• When your existing corporate organization no longer makes sense

How British Airways Soared To New Heights

British Airways has always been one of the top players in the airline industry. But they were facing the crunch when budget airlines started offering seats at dirt cheap price for customers who were mostly concerned about cost.

British Airways found that by transforming their processes to a digital base, they could ease the stress on employees and create less hassle for customers when it came to booking tickets, printing boarding passes, and managing reservations which gave passengers a highly distinguished difference between them and the competition. This ease of use justified the higher fares, since they were offering a greater level of convenience that customers were willing to spend on.

The electronic process transformation resulted in greater self-service models and an extremely simplified process. The transformation actually resulted in eliminating several processes which had unnecessarily complicated the process for customers.

Start Your Transformation with Kissflow

Kissflow is a low-code platform that makes your business process transformation a lot easier. You can digitize and automate business processes with little to no coding. The drag-and-drop form builder allows you to create workflows with conditional logic and parallel branches.

To ensure seamless transformation, Kissflow also offers governance features, allowing your IT team to monitor processes and step in at any time. 

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