Imagine wasting hundreds of productive hours and losing millions in potential revenue by repeating errors and manually doing tasks that could’ve been avoided with seamless processes.
Most managers hardly realize that inefficient business processes are the reason their company loses revenue and most of their employees underperform.
You need to learn how to optimize business processes. If your company’s processes are inefficient, you are most likely bleeding revenues
Your company might have defined processes for every single aspect of your day-to-day operations, but have you been reviewing them to determine if they are as efficient as they appear to be?
Although identifying stoppages and optimizing procedures for maximum productivity can cause frustration, it doesn’t have to be difficult and costly. You need to understand where your business currently is so that when it’s time to decide on what to add or remove, you can do so with little effort.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of what business process analysis entails, why it’s essential, how to conduct it, and how you can lead your company through it successfully.
All companies have processes. It can be as simple as purchasing raw materials, cutting wood, selling wood, receiving payments, and keeping stock of production expenses. It might be complicated like a two-step buying process for merchants.
Either way, without an efficient structure, a disorganized process might cause problems that will negatively affect your bottom line. Hence, it is crucial to learn business process analysis whether your company is small, mid-size, or big. Read on to understand its benefits, methods, and tools.
How Do You Define Business Process Analysis?
Business process analysis (BPA) is a careful inspection of various business systems to point out what’s working in your existing procedures, what’s faulty, and how to improve their efficiency. BPA describes the processes involved, groups contributing, information exchanged and documents produced. Leading firms widely use it to offer consulting services.
Using effective business process analysis can help your team be sure if your processes are meeting goals, identify faulty aspects of an operation, and even come up with smart strategies to prevent obstacles. Not conducting business analysis will make your team burn time and resources, solve the wrong problems, and increase your operational costs.
There are many business process analysis techniques, but they are all built on the premise that carefully optimized systems lead to better business outcomes, like reduced operational costs and increased revenue.
What Are Your Business Process Analysis Goals?
Without having a particular goal in mind before conducting process analysis, you may end up wasting resources and time.
However, having a specific objective will enable you to set the right targets, follow the right steps, determine the resources needed, and even monitor your progress to see which business processes are not meeting targets and why.
The skill of BPA will guide you from start to finish. However, before taking a peek at how you can conduct this in your company, let’s look at why you need it.
Chapter 2: What Benefits Can Your Company Gain From Business Process Analysis?
The knowledge of BPA helps companies enhance their processes and comes with a lot of benefits for the ones that conduct it regularly. Below are some advantages you’ll gain when you decide to analyze your organizational processes.
Fast and efficient systems
Increased staff and customer satisfaction
Drive control and consistency in quality delivery
The baseline for digital transformation
Encourages continuous improvement and innovation
Better alignment with your strategic KPIs (key performance indicators)
Identify causes of delay
Spot ways to cut operational costs
Fast and Efficient Systems
It’s common to hear managers, and sometimes business owners, say that only failing companies need to improve their business processes, but that’s untrue. It’s amazing to have a working system, but that’s not an excuse to make you relent. There is more progress you can gain by optimizing your processes for better results.
Your current processes don’t have to be faulty before the need to improve them comes up. If they’ve worked overtime, it’s proof that they are good enough. But remember, good can always be better. Why settle for less when you can have it all?
We can leverage the strengths of existing business processes to build better systems and increase productivity. This is because a refined process is familiar and makes it easy for you and your staff to adapt to it and hit targets.
Increased Staff and Customer Satisfaction
No company generates profits by default. They earn income by meeting the needs of customers with suitable products and services. Unless you’re running a charity-based organization, your target audience (customers) needs to have confidence that you can satisfy their desires so they can patronize you. This can guarantee that you thrive in your industry.
However, you need to review your buying processes and be sure that the steps to making a purchase and shipping a product to your customers aren’t stressful but seamless and convenient.
Successful companies always ensure that their staff work with uniform business processes all the time. They achieve this via business process analysis by formalizing their procedures.
A successful organization will ensure employees apply business processes and rules uniformly and consistently. Business process analysis facilitates this by formalizing procedures and properly documenting them. This enhances their consistency as compared to when they’re trying to perform tasks based on what they can recall.
Employees can now confidently perform their tasks without contemplating, as elements of guesswork are removed. In addition, this technique can help you as a manager easily track and monitor your employee performance and also confirm if they adhere to the standard of the customer. As a result, this drives a culture where both the management and staff can become accountable with measurable results.
The Baseline for Digital Transformation
Business process analysis will help you identify critical aspects that need change when you are planning to adopt new technology. Hence, when you assess, optimize, and review every process before embarking on digital transformation, you’ll gain more in terms of improved performance and rescued expenses.
Encourages Continuous Improvement and Innovation
Over time, it gets boring doing the same thing for years. However, it’s not about changing what already works but about improving what already works for higher performance.
It’s even more crucial to innovate when your current procedures are lagging, and at worst, not up to par with the latest industry standards. Trying out new ideas is one way through which organizations can identify more effective processes for business advancement.
In addition, business process analysis stimulates optimization and continuous improvement measures. Now, process improvement steps, like removing unnecessary process steps and suitable guidelines, can also increase overall productivity (i.e., high return on investment).
Better Alignment With Your Strategic KPIs
As your company grows, it becomes more difficult to organize and keep track of the communication across various departments, branches, and offices.
However, with the help of business process analysis, you can easily get real-time insights about where and how to fill communication gaps. Aside from that, the knowledge of BPA will help you refine your onboarding process for new hires to properly execute their tasks, which leads to improved business outcomes because every team member knows their roles and responsibilities.
Identify Causes of Delay
Business process analysis can help your business figure out operational efficiencies. Let’s say you’re in e-commerce and some customers cancel their orders and complain of lack of prompt deliveries.
A carefully done process analysis can help your company figure out exactly what’s withholding products from getting to your customers fast so you can speed up the delivery time.
As a result, it will drastically cut constant cases of canceled orders because of late deliveries. Plus, your profit margin per sale will go up.
Spot Ways to Cut Operational Costs
In line with the point above, another advantage of business process analysis is that it helps to shorten the time frame for business deals with minimal and yet effective methods. These adjustments help to reduce errors, increase quality performance, and ultimately boost the customer’s trust in the company’s products and or services.
Chapter 3: How to Properly Analyze and Improve Processes in Your Business
Knowing how to perform a proper analysis of your business processes is an important decision
Any manager who intends to drive growth, enhance customer satisfaction, or employee welfare needs to modify their existing processes after a careful review of every single process in their company. Before we go over how to do that, let’s briefly glance at some causes of poor organizational processes.
Here are the most common challenges that often lead to inefficient processes across diverse industries:
Lack of proper onboarding
Poor distribution of work
Lack of a process automation tool
Poor leadership
Lack of Proper Onboarding
Poor training of new company hires can make them second-guess a lot and have low employee morale to work, because second-guessing repeat avoidable mistakes, they lose their self-esteem and work slowly to avoid errors.
Thus, your production rate will drop and the error rate might still go up when the poorly trained staff try to rush things. It’s why you need to document your standard operating procedures and processes and automate them using the digital tool so you can properly train new staff without going back and forth.
Poor Distribution of Work
This is another major issue companies face daily. Poor allocation of work hinders the speed of task execution. They cause these sorts of blockages when a person is tied up with a lot of responsibilities while another staff member is idle.
This improper division of labor creates resentment, stress, and frustration, and decreases employee performance. It’s why you need to consider all of your staff before assigning duties.
More so, not setting clear boundaries in your onboarding documents about who does what, when, where, and how can always blur departmental lines and slow down your workflow.
Lack of a Process Automation Tool
This can hinder the smooth running of your business processes, especially if you have a few staff and the manual tasks rely on the person’s presence. Often, everything slows down because the personnel is absent.
Issues might end up making you lose productive hours and increase operational costs. However, you prevent those problems when you use the right digital tools that help you create and implement processes effectively.
Poor Leadership
Unlike good leaders who assist and motivate employees to follow due processes and beat deadlines while meeting up to company standards, a poor leader discourages their staff from performing their roles effectively.
In addition, a leader who is a poor communicator might find it hard to articulate the company’s vision and goals to their employees, and without a simple explanation, they won’t know where they are headed and why they’re working with certain processes.
Poor leadership at the top can hold back any progress in the abilities of executives within the company, as mid-level managers imitate the top leader’s poor decisions and management methods. The same thing trickles down to the low-level staff and eventually becomes part of the company culture, resulting in low motivation to follow company processes.
Proven Steps to Analyze Business Processes
Over time, business procedures can become outdated and less efficient as new technology comes up and they place restrictions. You need to assess your operations and make room for process improvement.
To analyze your business processes, follow these steps:
Specify the Process You Want to Analyze
This first step involves specifying what you aim to accomplish by performing an analysis. Maybe you want to have a better knowledge of a particular business process within your company. Or your efforts may be part of a bigger endeavor, like integrating automation into all your business processes.
Here, some examples of business processes you can select and examine include:
Scheduling appointments
Sales orders
Vendor management
Approvals of invoice
Employees onboarding
Travel orders
Purchase orders
Leads follow up
Compliance and audits
Ideally, you want to select a business process performed regularly that affects your bottom line. Establish an obvious start and endpoint with the business process you choose to analyze.
Collect Information About the Process to Analyze
The second phase is to gather as much information as you can from your team members, including both the low-level staff and stakeholders who partake in the particular process.
It’s not a bad idea to observe someone start and finish the process, so you can see firsthand how the process flows. Then carefully note how, when, and what; the sort of manual and digital tools they use; and which guidelines do they follow (if any). This will help you understand the process better.
You may need to interview or run a survey with your process users to extract the right information you need to identify any stoppages or bottlenecks. As you analyze, you’ll commonly find between 50 to 75 improvement opportunities. Carrying out this survey will help you brainstorm better ways to refine the process.
Map Out the Process
Business process mapping is a tool that visually illustrates every aspect of a process.
This step is the most tiring and time-consuming part of business process mapping. It is sketching out a process flowchart on a piece of paper in a clear and easy-to-understand manner.
It involves picking important information you’ve gathered in step two and presenting it in a clear and organized format. This will help you picture how every stakeholder plays their roles, what’s needed and not needed, and the obstacles hindering each process from getting optimal results.
Creating an organized and detailed visual map of the selected process will give you a general overview of the vital components of what is being removed or optimized. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:
Use color-coding and shorthand notations where necessary. For instance, the red color shows a process tie-up.
Use BPA software to design a process map. This will reduce stress and save you time.
Use software with a simple drag-and-drop workflow feature to create detailed business process maps.
The secret is to create your map in a clear and easy-to-follow way.
Analyze the Process
With your process visually mapped out with defined roles, goals, and objectives, this step of analysis needs a deep insight into your company’s KPIs. Hence, you need to answer the following questions:
Have you identified factors causing delays?
Have you spotted time-consuming parts?
Are there areas that can be automated?
Do workers have adequate facilities and equipment to carry out their roles?
What does your staff always complain about?
Is this process in line with your company’s SOPs and client expectations?
Can you cut down on operational costs?
You can easily find the answers to these questions by inspecting the process map you’ve created in the previous step and to be sure you’re still on the right path, ask for feedback from your stakeholders.
Identify the Potential for Business Process Improvement
Based on the findings from your analysis, you’ve most likely realized it’s important to note flaws in each vital aspect so you can sort them out and make improvements while bearing your company’s goals in mind.
The improvement that might suit your company hinges on your business condition. There’s no universal solution, and you perhaps need to get creative to come up with the right adjustments. Usually, the parts that need improvements often fall under the following:
Process stoppages: Understand why a process stops flowing smoothly at certain points and find smart ways to prevent them.
Handoffs: Whenever there’s communication or exchange of tasks among employees and systems, there’s always a tendency to see errors. The more the rate of handoffs, the higher the errors you’ll notice.
Relations with customers: Your staff needs to handle these moments excellently to deliver maximum satisfaction to your customers.
Company rules: these include policies that enhance the flow of the process and prevent the loss of time wastage in decision-making because they clearly define how processes should go.
Chapter 4: Best Business Process Analysis Techniques
Worldwide, poor connections in supply chain and service delivery have given rise to the need for improved business processes. When faulty procedures create problems for your employees, your customers, and your net profit, then business process analysis (BPA) is the way out.
To achieve your process analysis goals, you need proper techniques and their various metrics, not theoretical concepts or guesswork. The solution might seem simple: find the troublesome process, drill down precisely to the pain points, then develop a better process.
Several ways or techniques lead to profitable outcomes, but the results are not the same. A wrongly analyzed process might lead to several drawbacks if the real stoppages go undetected. With these five best analysis strategies, you can easily skip past paralysis and jump right into execution.
These techniques are:
Gap analysis
Value-added analysis
Root cause analysis
Observation analysis
Experience examination analysis
Technique 1: Gap Analysis
Gap analysis is essential in examining many types of organizational performance, and it’s sometimes referred to as needs analysis. It refers to how a company examines its current performance to uncover and fill in the gap between its current success and the level of growth you plan to achieve and to know if the business is efficiently using its resources and crushing its goals.
It does this by acknowledging its present situation by measuring finance, time, and workforce, and comparing it to a dream position. By determining these loopholes, the managing directors can develop an action plan to move the company forward and patch up these performance gaps.
A gap analysis was widely used in the 1980s alongside duration analysis, and it is best suited in situations where a company realizes that they’re not using their funds, technology, and resources as expected.
There are four steps to a gap analysis, which ends with an action plan showing areas in need of improvement, which are:
Step 1: Specifying Organizational Goals and Objectives
The first step has to do with correctly listing smart, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely company goals.
Step 2: Benchmarking the Present Situation
The next phase involves using historical statistics to measure its present output, as they relate to the outlined targets in step one above.
Step 3: Assessing the Gap Data
In this step, business analysts examine the compiled data and try to find out why the assessed performance is below expectations.
Step 4: Developing a Gap Report
The last step involves compiling a report according to the quantitative data and the qualitative explanations why the data is below expectations. Aside from that, it also included the action plan on what to do to crush company goals in this report.
Technique 2: Value-Added Analysis
The value-added analysis is a technique for detecting problems in a business process and finding the essential features of a product or service business process. This analysis helps team members to sort out steps that are valuable to the user and cut out the useless ones—especially the beneficial steps that satisfy customers or business needs kept and improved.
The primary goal of the analysis is to get value for the end product that is higher than its production cost. The production cost comprises all the resources which are required to produce the product or service, such as transport, raw material, warehouse, labor, and overhead expenses.
To properly conduct value-added analysis for a specific process, every activity about that process needs to be assessed meticulously. The value added by any activity to the entire process should be beneficial.
We calculate it as:
Value added = product’s value after the activity – product’s value before the activity
With this understanding in mind, evaluate what activities in your process fall into one of these three categories:
RVA (REAL-VALUE ADDED) Activities: It includes actions aimed at raising customers’ perceptions and satisfying the desires of your customers with your products and services. Some examples of real-value added activities are: taking customers’ orders, collecting material components, and product shipping.
BVA (BUSINESS-VALUE ADDED) Activity: These are actions that help managers and employees crush organizational goals, but don’t seem important from a customer’s viewpoint. Some examples are work done on audits, financial report preparation, and ordering business supplies.
NVA (NON-VALUE ADDED) Activity: These steps neither contribute toward satisfying customers’ desires nor do they meet your organizational goals. NVA is also called waste activities because even when excluded, they don’t reduce the quality of the end product. Some examples of NVA activities are:
Dealing with errors from previous steps in your process
Unnecessary walking and moving around
Waiting for other teammates to give you information
3. Root Cause Analysis
Root cause analysis (RCA) is finding out the origin and actual reasons for problems with business processes. It is built on the premise that it’s more efficient to prevent or solve the primary causes of a problem instead of merely treating the surface-level symptoms.
Root cause analysis comes in handy as a suitable method for uncovering the causes behind stoppages that could’ve been obscure. Being the method for drilling down to the heart of an issue, RCA is a sure path to look beyond random speculations about your problems.
You can use this technique with a variety of methods and principles that can all be used to discover the root causes of an occurrence or trend. Beyond the surface level, root-cause analysis can point out where your systems are faulty and what caused it.
Visual illustrations, tables, and charts are your primary way of discovering root cause relationships. The Ishikawa diagram indicates the causes of an event, outlines different steps in a process, shows where quality control problems might arise, and specifies which resources are needed at certain times.
The problems examined may comprise these particular enablers and guides:
Employees or stakeholders and supervisors
Guides such as quotations, logs, and agendas
Methods such as payment processing, request routing
Materials include consumables such as biros, sheet supplies, paper, and ink toner
Tools such as physical machines, devices, and other maintainable devices
Environment including onsite or offsite spaces that house and support the process
Between these elements lie the steps that affect the outcome. Even when you create connective threads, analysts may uncover more than they gather information from various standpoints. For example, each stakeholder and the particular circumstance could hold serious hidden issues. This might be unnoticed at first glance, but insisting on asking questions and being curious are the secrets to finding the probable causes.
4. Observational Analysis
Observation analysis gives business process reviewers an up-to-date, direct, and hands-on view of the process on the go. As an essential point of information gathering, observation uncovers ignored or underrated steps in a process. It also shows many nonexistent activities that are being recorded as an active element of the process.
Observers can also help in confirming if workers’ recall of a process is correct. A judgment that comes with experience can affect surveys and process mapping sessions. As amateurs to the process, analysts may see and query blockages to a process that a master has overlooked.
An observer may choose to work using one of these two models:
Passive observers: Avoid interfering and leave the process simple.
Active observers: They jump in with questions and may engage in the process to get insights on the go.
Regardless of the method, observation has an essential precaution. It introduces your analyst as a foreign presence that may artificially shape the process. Unlike in the other four techniques, the observational analysis shifts the analyst from a stranger to an element in the process itself.
It will be smart to plot and define their roles with employees. An open and realistic expectation might help keep the process free of bias. Observers would be wise to plan and clarify their roles with employees.
Clear expectations can help keep the process free of defects, even in passive observation. Being aware of this influence will make your team members adjust their judgments appropriately. Your team will also need to overcome their inherent bias, perform multiple sessions under different workloads, and understand what to observe.
5. Experience Examination Analysis
Experience examination analysis captures the process mastery of old-time employees. Unlike observation that collects information from an amateur viewpoint, experience examination uncovers lessons learned by experienced staff.
Experience-based knowledge is not reported and rarely talked about. Thus, the reason behind such activities won’t be documented through interviews, observations, and sessions only.
Targeting experienced employees enables teams to find information on things like:
What powers high-level performance in the process?
What leads to faulty practices within the process?
This kind of analysis can unearth the vital links between root causes and non-value added activities. The effect of these often “undetected” factors—like organizational culture and complex policies—may be noticeable by only an experienced staff since they’ve seen its effect for at least 10 years or more. This technique brings such insight into the entire organization.
If your company has kept experienced staff that fully understands your process, then experience analysis is key to getting lasting effects. It also enables teams to preserve this exclusive information even after the specialists leave your organization.
Consider experience analysis whether you’d like to support theories about your other analysis data or if you seek to enhance your process visibility.
Chapter 5: Best Business Process Analysis Tools
Companies trying to document, analyze, and simplify complex processes, to boost productivity, enhance product or service quality, be more efficient and competitive normally use business process analysis tools (BPA tools).
The first step in automating your business processes is getting them digitized and visualized with a great business process modeling tool. But after your process has been running for a while, you must be able to examine it and determine if it needs optimizing.
That’s where business process analysis tools come in. They enable business process designers and business process analysts to comprehend their business processes, workflows, events, and data using tested modeling techniques. This allows users to derive deeper insights into how their process is flowing and to enable them to adjust or remove faulty parts by leveraging their analytical efforts.
Importance of Business Process Analysis Tools
We’ve already learned that the goal of business process analysis is to increase process optimization for increased productivity. We’ve also shown you business process analysis tools, but what are the benefits? What are the major advantages of this business process analysis (BPA) software?
Here are seven key benefits of BPA tools:
Increase staff and customer satisfaction
Reduce error rate
Enable integration
Save time and money
Enhance communication flow between team members
Increase Staff and Customer Satisfaction
Since these tools help to ease the stress in time-consuming steps analysts have to go through, making tasks less complex and easy to perform, the employees can now perform their roles with fewer hitches and beat deadlines.
Likewise, it helps analysts to easily point out which and what aspect of a customer relationship management is faulty and needs change, such as finding what leads to a delay in product delivery to customers, like needless sign-up forms. Thus, it helps in satisfying customers’ desires.
BPA software is systematic and automated such that human errors are prevented and the results of each analysis are accurate and reliable, which reduces wastage and increases monetary reserves to use in other areas of the business.
Another benefit is that enhanced accuracy makes it easier to create more high-quality product features that are cost-efficient and less time-consuming.
When a company resolves fewer process tie-ups, addresses customers, and streamlines workflows, they’ll have more time to innovate and develop.
Enable Integration
No need to bother if they’ll be compatible with your devices. Most good BPA tools are not only extensions for Chrome browsers, but you can install them as apps on either an Android or iOS device and manage them on the go.
Save Time and Money
You already know that time is a priceless commodity, especially if you want to build a new product that meets your existing customers’ expectations. Hence, business process analysis tools come in handy to enable you to free up time by automating manual tasks. This helps you to have more time to spend on activities that add to the bottom line.
Asides from that, some BPA tools allow everyone on your team to get access to every feature. There is no need for individual subscriptions for every teammate. It’s all-inclusive with no costly fees.
Enhance Communication Flow Between Team Members
Leadership team coach Jeff Boss, in an article on Forbes, once said:
When workgroups operate individually, repeated efforts and missteps in important processes are more likely to occur. Managers need an appropriate solution that connects cross-functional efforts, enhances teamwork, and reduces human error. Business process solutions to work management features and automation tools allow teams to spend less time on repetition.
From automatically giving tasks to suitable employees and syncing calendars, to-do lists, deadlines, and simple automation can make teamwork simpler and more efficient—especially if your company has a lot of complicated systems of operation that cuts across different departments, or information sources in the firm.
With the right BPA tools, your team members can easily sketch diagrams, and visually present the flow of processes so you can see and pick out the faulty parts. Stakeholders can conveniently share and save notes between themselves, create models, and implement process automation features.
Examples of the Best Business Process Analysis Tools
You’ve already learned a lot about business process analysis and its benefits, but it’s hard to conduct it without having the right tools. Here are 10 of the best BPA tools out there, what makes them different, efficient, and reliable.
SweetProcess
Kissflow
Signavio
Appian
Heflo
Engage Flow
Process Maker
Zoho Creator
Bizagi
ProWorkflow
Comindware
SweetProcess
SweetProcess is a business process analysis tool that helps you to assess and uncover faulty parts that need improvement in your business processes in record time.
You can use SweetProcess for different day-to-day operations and major projects in your company. Even if you work remotely, the collaboration features allow for team members to share, plan, and work together in real-time. It’s used across a wide range of industries, including:
Professional services
Health care
Manufacturing
Transportation
Real estate
Hospitality
Insurance
And that’s not all. SweetProcess gives you access to the following benefits:
Features:
Document company procedures
Combine different procedures to form a seamless workflow
Turn and assign procedures into individual tasks
Real-time collaboration with team members
Print out documents and files for offline viewing
Create a knowledge base for your employees
Integrates with over 1,000 apps and software
Insert files, images, links, tables, and videos into your procedures
Restrict or give access to team members to brainstorm, plan, and share
Change screenshots and images right inside the app
View all improvements made with each version history
Secure your account using the two-factor authentication feature
Access to email support whenever you need help
Pricing:
It has a 14-day free trial period and an option to upgrade to a Pro plan for $99 (if you have a team of up to 20 members).
Available on:
Web and mobile
Kissflow
Kissflow is a BPA software that allows companies to evaluate and patch up the loopholes in their current business processes. It’s a no-code system that allows business analysts to optimize workflows, implement business policies, and make process changes without having to code.
Kissflow is not limited to organized and repetitive processes. It also supports different tasks like case studies, projects, and lots more. It allows users to share, plan, brainstorm, and make revisions together.
Features:
Ready-made app templates
Visual workflow and form design tool
Integrates with 400+ cloud-based software services
Instant alerts to keep you updated via phone or email
Drag-and-drop from designer
Business process automation and process mapping designer
Google-provided security to encrypt and secure company data
SLA status indicators
Tasks progress tracker
Inbuilt reports on process metrics and stats
Admin control feature to secure data
Pricing:
It offers flexible pricing built for every business needs:
Basic: $10 per user per month
$200/20 users
Advance: $9.90 per user/monthly
$495/50 users
Fully-loaded: $19 per user/monthly
$1,900/100 users
Enterprise: not specified. (You may need their contact support team to learn more.)
Available on:
iOS and Android
Signavio
Signavio is a business process solution built to leverage your current procedures and help to optimize them with your business goals in mind. It incorporates three different products: process manager, workflow accelerator, and process intelligence.
Signavio process manager is an intuitive solution for professional process and decision modeling. The process manager’s straightforward interface allows for the gap, cost, and impact analysis among and between models. Signavio workflow accelerator enables users to streamline workflows on their own, removing large and murky workflow systems to create simple workflows based on your business needs.
Signavio process intelligence allows you to easily build process models from one to two of your existing systems. Continual monitoring of processes gives you insight into risks and continuous improvement opportunities.
Features:
Review tasks before publishing
Messaging tool for collaboration with colleagues
Intuitive process modeling
No complex software installation needed
High-grade protection of company data
Process approval control feature
Company policy compliance tracking
File management
Customizable dashboard
Forms management
Visual workflow editor
Process change tracking, modeling, and designer
Third-party integration
Task and workflow management
Reporting and analytics
Pricing:
It comes with a 30-day free trial. Should you require a month or more use period, contact their support on signavio.com
Available on:
Windows, Linux, and Macintosh desktop platforms.
Appian
Appian has been a low-code BPA tool for a long time. It gives business analysts lots of abilities to examine and optimize processes to increase the business bottom line.
While it’s not the most technical out there, it has a decent amount of features to suit your business needs. It can easily recount your entire process so you can go back in time to analyze and find out the root cause of your process bottlenecks. Appian also gives you enough data for predictive analysis to see your item’s past performance and from where problems may arise.
Features:
Drag-and-drop visual design
Business process automation
Flexible collaboration tool for teams
Mobile development
Process change tracking
Business process control unit
Real-time alerts and notifications
Reusable process models & designs
Concise reporting/analytics
Software development
Pricing:
Appian offers a 14-day free trial with an option to upgrade to either:
Application edition: $75/user/month
Enterprise edition: $150/user/month
Appian also includes flat-fee rates and enterprise custom quotes, which are both available on request.
Available on:
Cloud: SaaS, web-based
Desktop: Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chrome book
Mobile: Android and iOS
Heflo
Heflo is a full-blown business process analysis software built to service agencies, SMEs, mid,- and large-scale businesses. The business suite provides users the chance to collaborate, enforce business policies, design, map, model, and automate processes in one place.
The tool comes with a web-based ability to help users create professional, stylish, and complete diagrams and documents. Plus, you don’t have to install anything—it safely stores your files in the cloud and is accessible anytime you need them.
Project managers can easily assign tasks to employees, set deadlines, and implement standard operating procedures right inside the tool.
Features:
Design, analyze, map, and optimize business processes
Cloud-based modeling without installation or maintenance
Full support for BPMN 2.0
Version control of diagrams and documentation
Creates fully professional documents
Ergonomic and intuitive software interface
Get support, training, and coaching services with SLA (service level agreement)
Delegate tasks to staff and manage deadlines
Charts and interactive filters to make smart decisions based on real insights
Pricing:
Heflo offers a free trial with a $10/month subscription.
Available on:
Web, desktop, and Android, and iOS devices.
Engage Process
Engage Process is a business process management (BPA) software that allows businesses to build customized processes with a visual editor and data mapping tool. The all-in-one BPA tool allows users to collaborate, visually present their process, review their effectiveness, and spot process drawbacks that need improvement.
The BPA suite drag-and-drop feature enables users to produce process maps to analyze and compare processes. To do this, users simply pick from various kinds of steps using the intuitive icons on display.
Using Engage Process, processes can also be improved by dragging and dropping selected steps to various stages of a workflow and displayed to teammates when necessary. Here are some of the important features of Engage Process:
Features:
Drag-and-drop process designer
No-code software
Process change tracking
Process modeling and designing
Real-time reporting and statistics
Reporting/analytics
User management
Map, view, analyze, and improve business processes at once
Visual workflow editor
Workflow management
Customizable process reports
Data import/export
Access control/management
Pricing:
Process Maker plans include:
Professional: $75/month
Team: $115/month
Suite: $4,900/year up to $11,100/year
Available on:
Web, Android, and iOS.
ProcessMaker
With a BPA tool like ProcessMaker, you don’t have to depend on your IT unit to organize and manage processes. The software is an intuitive no-code tool that allows you to build efficient processes.
Its business process automation helps reduce manual tasks and process stoppages that can obstruct processes from flowing smoothly.
It has customized dashlets you can design to display metrics and give in-depth reports on your processes—especially reports about team members who are fast action takers and who are moving items slowly.
Features:
Customizable templates to design documents
Business process automation
Business process control unit
Team collaboration tools
Employees’ policy compliance tracking
Process change tracking
Customizable forms and fields
Graphical workflow editor
Process control
Process modeling & designing templates
Real-time reporting and analytics
Third-party integrations
Visual workflow configuration, and management
Pricing:
ProcessMaker offers a 30-day free trial after which pricing is:
Standard: $1,495 per month
Enterprise: They provide pricing quotes based on request.
Corporate: Contact ProcessMaker for pricing information.
You can also request a free demo to test run any of the plans you prefer.
Available on:
Android, desktop, and web
Zoho Creator
Zoho Creator is an all-in-one low-code business process tool that allows businesses to create, manage and streamline processes without the usual slow and ineffective hassle of manual methods.
Zoho Creator’s powerful tools for data collection and management, analysis, reporting, and collaboration make it an affordable option for agencies and small-, mid-, and large-scale businesses with its ease-of-use and secure cloud storage.
Its low-code suite enables you to input your business rules and automatically build your customized database apps. You can schedule tasks, create tables, forms, and refresh or import .csv, .xls, and .mbd files online in minutes.
Features:
Simple workflow creator
Reports scheduler
Admin panel to withdraw or give permissions
Sends instant notifications
Pre-built application templates
Encrypted and secure documents sharing
Customized business workflow templates
Group chat to share files and edit together
Business process automation
Built-in barcode, maps, and camera
Active customer portal
Pricing:
Zoho Creator offers a free trial plan, and subscriptions start at $25/month with other options:
Professional: $25/user/month billed annually
Ultimate: $400/month billed annually, unlimited apps, and 10 users included ($25/additional user/month)
Available on:
Web, desktop
Bizagi
Bizagi is a business process analysis solution that allows users to visually design, enhance, and execute business processes. Its cloud-based version gives you access to tools for the automation to build, optimize, and broadcast dynamic workflows with other team members.
Bizagi’s robust platform links employees, apps, gadgets, and data, and helps to provide an engaging experience customers demand. Staff can easily create and publish new process models, business process apps, cooperate, see the revision history, and lots more together.
All process models are saved securely in the cloud and can be easily accessed for review and observation by any member with permission, anywhere.
Features:
Advanced search field
Process revision history
Admin-only access controls/permissions
Instant alerts/notifications
Business process automation
Workgroup collaboration tools
Drag-and-drop process designer
No-code interface
Process change tracking
Process control, modeling, and designing
Reporting/analytics
Rules-based workflow
Third-party integrations
Workflow management
Pricing:
Bizagi offers a free trial after which you can upgrade to a premium account. However, you may need to contact support to request a pricing plan.
Available on:
Desktop, web, iOS, and Android
ProWorkflow
ProWorkflow is a business process analysis (BPA) suite that enables users to collaborate with team members by displaying their processes for easy review, monitoring, and management.
It helps a lot in team collaboration by displaying all completed, ongoing, and future projects for team members to view. Users can help inform each other by privately or publicly sharing projects, attaching files, recording, and sending instant messages.
Third-party apps and plug-ins can integrate with the ProWorkflow dedicated app store, and add-ons such as time Chrome-based time trackers and profit reports are available too.
Features:
Import/export files and documents
Data visualization and synchronization
KPI monitoring
Kanban board
Invoice management
Issue tracking and iteration management
Employee management
Goal and deadline management
Graphical workflow editor
Idea management
Pricing:
Free trial is available, and the premium plan starts from:
Professional: $20/staff user/month
Advanced: $30/staff/month
Client and contractor access is free on all the plans, and professional and advanced plans include unlimited active projects.
Available on:
Web, Android, and iOS.
Comindware
Comindware is a cloud-based business analysis tool that doesn’t require IT resources to set up. Users can easily edit forms, data, and workflows on the go with a simple drag-and-drop interface.
With this process analysis tool, you can build web forms and gather important data while executing your workflows. Asides from that, Comindware can enable users to get instant reports and updates on their progress, collaborate with workgroups and get rid of unorganized emails and chats between employees.
Features:
Team collaboration tools
Timeline view
Access and approval process controls
Customizable forms and dashboard
Milestone tracking
Portfolio management
Resource allocation, planning, and management
Task management
Graphical workflow editor
Real-time reporting
Workflow configuration
Third-party integrations
Pricing:
It starts from $9.99/user/month. However, should you require a plan that accommodates more users, then contact their support team.
Available on:
Comindware is available on the Cloud or as on-premise software.
Your Choice
Usually, business analysts consider getting a BPA tool when they’ve already had a process. However, if you pick software with poor analytics and a complex interface, you may regret it over time or even waste a lot of resources building custom forms and importing and sending out data again and again. You may have existing processes but can’t properly assess and be sure it’s productive.
That’s why it pays to get a BPA tool offering low- or no-code features with comprehensive analytics. Try SweetProcess to get the hang of how the platform suits your business needs.
Chapter 6: How SweetProcess Can Help Optimize Your Business Processes for Better Performance
When you select the tool for your business process analysis, you want to ensure that it suits your company’s needs, particularly areas that can deal with the pressures and challenges of scaling your business.
SweetProcess matches those necessities and more.
SweetProcess is one of the most reliable software for business process analysis, whether it is business process automation, intelligent process automation, or robotic process automation.
It has improved the business processes of several businesses by helping them efficiently optimize their procedures.
Aside from being a no-code tool, it’s an all-in-one intuitive suite that provides all the essential tools needed to enhance workflows and automate even complicated business processes in minutes. But don’t take our word for it—see how it has helped Ginkgo Residential.
Ginkgo Residential’s portfolio analytics manager, Sarah Genay, was assigned to supervise business process documentation in their organization to simplify workflows, training, and improve their employee’s productivity, but they couldn’t do much by relying on PDF guides.
In her words:
“It’s just very old-fashioned. If you hand somebody a PDF that includes everything that everyone needs to do in their company, that’s a great resource to have as a company, but that’s a really overwhelming thing to receive as an employee because you don’t know where the information that you need is.”
Although the guides were available to everyone, there were so many knowledge gaps and employees couldn’t handle their tasks appropriately, or they underperformed. This took a toll on their productivity.
Sarah knew what their company was looking out for—a well-optimized process. She learned about SweetProcess and tried it, despite several tempting options available in the marketplace. Since they picked SweetProcess, Ginkgo Residential has been able to properly onboard new staff, eliminate recurring errors, and enhance productivity with its all-in-one process documentation suite.
Likewise, Stanley Kolosovsky, the technology process coordinator at Atlantic Sapphire, was entrusted with optimizing the company’s operations, but their existing process was not efficient enough to achieve that. He kept struggling with the software they had despite being a computer science minor and a process-driven ISO 9001 certified auditor.
It was twice as hard for his colleagues with no process experience or background in computer engineering. Aside from that, knowledge transfer was an issue. There was an urgent need to train their employees in their United States branch to ensure quality and effective collaboration.
“It also shortens training times. It’s a very easy software to say, ‘Hey, read through this, and then we’ll test you if you know what you’re doing.’ And with all those step-by-step instructions, it’s really hard to mess up.”
No need to waste time manually preparing documents and finding it hard to scale when you can easily streamline your operations with SweetProcess. Sign up for a 14-day free trial today to see how it works.
Conclusion
You’ve gone through the article. You somehow feel your business needs to conduct a business analysis. But how can you ensure you properly start and complete this process? We’ll help you make that confirmation.
But first, download our free PDF on 7 Mistakes to Avoid When Conducting Business Process Analysis to start on the right footing. And don’t forget about signing up for SweetProcess! Our support staff is ever ready to offer you a FREE trial of your efficient BPA tool, so you can get started right away.
Do it with SweetProcess, click here to learn more
Leave a Reply