Many enterprises have adopted business process management (BPM) technology to evolve and remain competitive in recent years, and apparently, this trend continues. Organizations keep investing their resources, so the BPM market is growing.

The high adoption of bpm software makes it evolve and become more intelligent and user-friendly, enabling businesses to accelerate digital transformation while relieving them of restrictions and expenditures associated with traditional solutions.

The Shift in BPM Technology

BPM software has always been essential for enterprises striving to optimize their existing infrastructure, automate routine operations and tasks, and enhance collaboration and communication between employees and departments.

Nevertheless, implementation and use of traditional BPM technology sometimes could do a disservice and instead become a burden for businesses for several interrelated reasons:

• Many developers of BPM software put functionality at the forefront and paid little attention to design and usability, so traditional solutions today may provide poor user experience while looking outdated or even archaic.
• Due to the complex software architecture and overloaded functionality, organizations had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars just to install and configure their BPM systems.
• Even after implementation and customization, companies had to spend resources on training employees or even maintaining entire IT departments to make sure the software works stably and ceaselessly.
• Traditional BPM systems could reduce the flexibility and adaptability of enterprises, since any customizations, updates, and process changes required much time and effort.

A new breed of BPM software, also known as intelligent BPM (IBPM), eliminates these downsides and enriches traditional solutions with innovative functionality, including AI-powered features, real-time data analytics, and low-code capabilities.

At the heart of this innovative software is the idea that people who know the problem and face it every day are those who should solve it. So this software is aimed at providing specialists and business leaders with tools that allow them to manage and modify processes without much technical help.

At the same time, BPM consultants and developers are now taking into account the latest UX/UI design practices, so modern BPM systems look and feel much better than traditional ones from a user’s perspective.

In sum, all this makes IBPM software more agile, convenient, and cost-effective compared to traditional BPM systems in Digital Transformation.

How Traditional BPM Paved the Way for the Evolution

Despite their differences, each of the various definitions of digital transformation implies using digital technology to shift from legacy approaches to newer and smarter ones. In this regard, traditional BPM has fulfilled several vital roles for enterprises:

1. Transforming Operational Processes

In Digital Transformation, Adaptation to new market conditions encouraged companies to constantly improve their business processes, increasing the overall complexity of operations. BPM software helped organizations handle this complexity, make work processes more transparent, and improve them continuously.

2. Transforming Business Models

In the new digital transformation reality, work on one project could be carried out by dozens of employees from different departments, which posed a challenge to companies regarding employee collaboration and communication. BPM allowed enterprises to smoothly shift to a collaboration-centric model, ensuring effective and effortless employee interaction.

3. Transforming the customer experience

Given the growing expectations of customers and the need to address the demand comprehensively, BPM was indispensable for streamlining and optimizing customer-related processes while providing faster and higher quality service in Digital Transformation. Partly, this became possible by automating routine activities since professionals got more time to interact with customers and improve their experience.

So What Happens When IBPM Joins the Game?

Considering that IBPM is a more advanced and innovative incarnation of BPM, the next-generation intelligent software can fulfill all of the listed roles but be even better, faster, and more cost-effective. Still, it wouldn’t be called intelligent if everything was limited only to these three things — enriched IBPM capabilities allow enterprises to enhance decision making and increase agility even more.

IBPM systems empowered with artificial intelligence and other innovative technologies can collect and manage vast amounts of data. The important thing is that intelligent software doesn’t chaotically accumulate information but delivers regular reports with the most relevant data, allowing business users to draw correct conclusions and act immediately in Digital Transformation.

This gap between data and actions can be narrowed even further by low-code capabilities: using these features, employees can create and edit processes on their own. Thus, even non-tech employees can take action without the help of IT specialists, which significantly increases the flexibility and speed of work.

Many actions don’t have to be taken manually either. Since complex automation modules powered with AI, such as inventory management, document management, help desk, timesheets, and marketing automation enable end-to-end business process automation, employees can save time and become even more productive.

Another advantage of IBPM over legacy systems lies in their capability to operate in a cloud-based environment in Digital Transformation. Now, enterprises don’t have to maintain expensive local storage, and employees can have real-time unhampered communication with colleagues, regardless of their location.

Wrap-up

In today’s fast-paced and competitive business environment, enterprises have to adapt and continuously improve their workflows. In the past, traditional BPM software coped with the needs of businesses, but today it becomes evident that there are more relevant and valuable solutions on the market in Digital Transformation Trends.

Intelligent business process management software (IBPM) also assists enterprises on their journey to digital transformation but does it even more effectively. IBPM narrows the gap between insights and actions more than ever and provides the opportunity for non-technical employees to manage their workflows directly.