Enhancing BPM with low-code tools

How low-code tools facilitate BPM

Building applications, processes, and websites can seem daunting, especially for those who aren’t engineers, designers, or developers. Low-code development tools help non-developers without any previous coding experience build complex business solutions. Low-code tools make it easier to create what you need fast.

When building your business, implementing BPM can help simplify the tasks you need to complete daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. Optimizing, monitoring, and analyzing your business workflows in combination with low-code development platforms will improve productivity, offer visibility, and gather insights for everyone involved.

What is low-code development?

Low-code development is the visual approach to software development that uses minimal coding to help build websites, applications, and processes. Instead of writing long lines of complex code using traditional computing programming, this development solution uses drag-and-drop graphical modelers and point-and-click interface creation to create low-code apps fast.

Through simplification and automation, low-code development reduces or eliminates recurring tasks. As low-code development helps enable less technically savvy employees to work on digital projects, it can also provide experienced programmers flexibility on more complicated work. You’re able to shorten the development lifecycle and accomplish more in less time.

The advantages of using low-code development

Low-code development is redefining how businesses use technology—especially those with limited knowledge of developing mobile apps and websites. It’s a game-changer. Some of the benefits of using low-code development are:

• Ease of use: Since anyone can use low-code tools, any employee can jump in and create solutions easily.
• Reduced business costs: By automating manual tasks and eliminating redundant ones, low-code app development offers a way to make digital solutions without the costly IT overhead and additional third-party resources.
• Less maintenance: Because of standardized components, there are fewer bugs, integration issues, and complications in your build.
• Products and solutions go live faster: Solutions are developed, tested, evaluated, and adjusted without needing any traditional coding experience, so business partners can create products and solutions quickly.
• Increased connectivity: By aligning your IT needs with your business goals, everyone—from proficient developers to those with no experience—can work together to seamlessly develop websites and apps, eliminating knowledge gaps and the need for additional developer staffing.
• Better governance: IT teams and development operations experts can maintain all apps are created with complete governance capabilities and compliance.

What is business process management?

As a business grows, its processes become more complex and harder to handle. To help manage those workflows, many businesses turn to BPM. Business process management, or BPM, is the methodology of analyzing, optimizing, and accelerating your business processes or workflows. A business process is a sequence of repeatable tasks completed to achieve an objective. Each business process can take a few minutes to weeks and is divided into three process categories: operational, management, and support.

BPM focuses on the whole process, rather than a few tasks, resulting in fewer errors, lower costs, and improved outcomes. By combining performance, strategy, mapping, technology, and analysis, BPM makes it possible to take a high-level view of your organizational goals and optimize your operations at every stage.

BPM is not just about managing one process to help a single workflow execute smoothly—BPM aims to unify the optimization of a company’s workflows and benefit everyone as every function works hand-in-hand with each other, if not all parts.

The benefits of BPM

When standardizing processes, adding in BPM will help you in your build. The top five benefits of implementing BPM are:

1. Increased productivity. BPM helps your entire organization build a framework for every process. All processes are documented, monitored, and optimized, and by collecting data and making recommendations for those processes, tasks that have no value are identified and eliminated, increasing overall productivity.
2. Increased agility. As you build your process apps with BPM, you’ll be able to document and standardize processes automatically, meaning you can respond to change faster and more efficiently.
3. Compliance. BPM helps streamline processes and implement a framework that complies with all internal and external policies. Your BPM implicitly understands the multiple industry and department policies it needs to comply with and acts accordingly.
4. Less overseeing. With BPM handling more complex, arduous tasks, managers won’t have to micromanage. You can document standard operating procedures at every stage, and anyone can check where they stand within the process.
5. Fewer errors. Spreadsheets and emails are prone to human error. Errors are also impossible to track when and by whom when managed in spreadsheets. With BPM, the possibility of errors is significantly reduced, and when they do happen, can be traced back to the source.

As your business adapts to new digital tools and practices, your adaptability is a crucial point in your digital transformation. Using no-code or low-code BPM methodology as part of your digital transformation is vital as you build toward your organizational goals for the future. And while there are many benefits, there could still be a few trials to implementing BPM into your workflows.

The challenges in BPM

No matter the size of your business, you must be prepared to adapt and respond to whichever challenges come your way. Even small businesses need BPM. Some of these challenges include:

• Too many solutions. As organizations use many solutions to fill in the gaps to solve problems, this could lead to a disjointed outcome, resulting in a waste of time as employees attempt to organize and connect the data they’ve found.
• Siloed teams. New additions, products, and updates are delayed when employees unintentionally withhold information because they are siloed, working in teams that are isolated from each other. This causes a break in communication, knowledge, productivity, and collaboration efforts.
• Too much visibility. As processes within BPM software can bring real-time visibility into their data operations, it might be too much too soon. Many stakeholders might need help understanding the data they’ve received and could hesitate or hastily make crucial organizational decisions with the wrong information. Dictating who can see what data will help stakeholders focus on what they need to see.
• Inconsistent analysis. When disjointed, it’s also challenging to measure, track, and repeat your processes. If you’re unable to have a complete analysis while these processes are working, you’re unable to improve these processes for today and the future.
• Poor buy-in. As people want to do more with less, a solution like BPM can seem like it’ll solve any problem. First, leaders must be convinced that implementing a BPM will help immensely but isn’t the one-click solution they might perceive it to be. BPM managers and consultants also need to champion BPM to their end users to ensure their needs are met too.

All of these challenges can cause customer satisfaction to slip while also decreasing business sales and revenue. And, in turn, both your BPM efforts and the organization suffer.

How BPM with low-code tools work together

Low-code development and BPM are not equals—one is a compilation of tools that helps automate processes, and the other is a philosophy that facilitates building apps and websites. By using low-code tools to automate tedious tasks and manual labor, you help support your BPM goals of coordinating businesses, people, systems, and things to yield success within your business strategies. Below are the five stages of BPM and how adding complementing low-code tools can enhance them:

1. Discovery. To enhance and streamline your processes, you’ll first need to understand how your work flows from one action to another. That means gathering data from multiple tools, following the steps of each process, and interviewing various stakeholders. With low code, your discovery process becomes more manageable—using data science and machine learning to analyze systems and learn what’s happening within the process so you’ll know how to optimize.
2. Design. Once you’ve examined your current process, you’ll find areas where you can improve. Low-code platforms can help you plan your strategy, using visual modeling tools to draw out the workflow, like a flowchart. This also helps guarantee each task automatically adds any organizational, industry, federal, and local rules and regulations you’ll need to follow to ensure compliance.
3. Execution. Once you’ve designed your workflows, you need to implement them. With your pre-built modelers and components, your workflows will make it easier to replicate this process and your product will get to market faster. And since you’ll be able to use your low-code tool on any device or operating platform without extra work, you can work cross-platform functionally.
4. Measurement and analysis. You need to make sure your new workflow is working efficiently. The process mining tools you used in the discovery stage are crucial but aren’t the only tools you need to measure and analyze performance. Low-code tools can also help build automated tools to visualize the process, reassign tasks, and ensure you’re executing tasks optimally.
5. Optimization. There’ll always be room for improvement. As industries change, technology evolves, and business conditions happen, you need to be able to adjust to each quickly. A traditional coding sprint requires months to address those changes, but a low-code platform can aggregate data to reveal improvement opportunities and create smart, self-optimizing processes.

The future of low-code development and BPM

When paired with BPM, low-code development helps your business to work faster and continue its digital transformation. Using BPM with low code allows for automating business processes quickly but with a positive impact on results, cost, and productivity.

The business world moves fast, and the marketplace needs to be able to keep up. Combining a low-code solution with your BPM discipline grants your non-developers opportunities to identify and solve multifaceted business challenges, so that your solution is able to handle more processes faster and without complexity.

While BPM alone can transform your organization’s operations, it can struggle with the inefficiencies of siloed systems and manual labor prone to human error. By implementing low-code solutions with your BPM, you’ll automate, streamline, and optimize your processes, ensuring success with your flexible and resilient organizational strategies.

Frequently asked questions

How are companies using low-code platforms?

Companies use low-code platforms to fill in developer gaps and business needs to build mobile apps, websites, and workflows faster.

What problems do low-code tools solve?

The problems low-code tools solve are developer shortages, organizational compliance, and ease of use for employees of all levels.

What are the five benefits of implementing business process management?

The five benefits of implementing BPM are increased productivity, increased agility, ensured compliance, less oversight, and fewer errors.

What is low-code BPM?

Low-code BPM is the method of using a low-code platform to help optimize your business process management.

How is low-code development shaping the future of business?

Low-code development is shaping the future of business as it helps employees at all levels create products or solutions that deploy easier, faster, cheaper, and without complexity.

What are some of the important benefits of low-code development?

Some of the benefits of low-code development are easy-to-use tools, reduced costs, less maintenance, faster deployment, better governance, and increased connectivity.