BPM Analytics

Leveraging BPM Analytics for quality management: Improving processes and reducing defects

Business process management (BPM) is a practice that can raise the operational effectiveness of an organisation and improve its work quality. Human errors can be reduced because of automation and standardisation, business agility can be improved, time can be saved and the organisation can be in alignment with its digital transformational goals. Quality management ensures that organisations maintain a defined level of quality in all their products and services, and follow standardised processes. Consistency in production quality is often the most important management goal of organisations since any drop in quality would lead to drop in customer satisfaction. 

BPM analytics involves the use of data and analytical tools to identify bottlenecks, gather insights into business processes, measure performance, and drive process improvement. When BPM analytics is used in quality management, organisations can better identify and analyse quality issues, boost process efficiency and overall quality, manage quality risks and ensure customer satisfaction in terms of quality. 

Some of the primary reasons BPM analytics should work hand-in-hand with quality management systems (QMS) include:

Boost in business agility

Change is unavoidable and a change in the business landscape can be triggered by many causes. Whatever the cause, organisations must be able to react quickly to change in order to remain relevant. Implementing BPM analytics for quality management ensures organisations have enough historical data to be able to understand and analyse the effects of change and how best to manage the situation. This enables organisations to maintain business agility under most circumstances.

Improvement in efficiency and visibility

With BPM analytics actively monitoring quality issues, organisations can quickly spot inefficiencies, eliminate any waste created and thereby maximise efficiency. The more detailed the analysis, the better the picture of every step, and that enables increased visibility and consequently nurtures continuous improvements and efficiency.

Assurance of security and compliance

When every step of a process is outlined clearly, organisations can ensure that all compliance standards are met and the operating environment is secure.

Ease of transfer of business knowledge

Documentation of processes is encouraged by BPM for quality and that ensures workflow and knowledge are recorded, shared and archived. This helps transfer business knowledge to successive employees without disruption even when there is a change in personnel.

The key ways in which BPM analytics can be implemented for quality management include:

Monitoring processes

Organisations can track real-time performance by monitoring key quality indicators and metrics. Such trackers can help identify potential quality issues, thereby enabling organisations to intervene at the right time to take corrective actions.

Analysing root causes

The root causes of quality problems can be understood by implementing BPM analytics. Process data can be analysed and patterns can be understood so that organisations could plan and implement corrective measures.

Setting performance benchmarks

BPM analytics can help organisations set performance benchmarks by comparing existing quality measures against predefined or industry benchmarks. Gaps in performance and quality maturity can be assessed and targets for improvement can be set.

Generating predictive models

BPM analytics enables proactive quality management. It can forecast quality outcomes by analysing historical process data and this allows organisations to identify potential quality risks and subsequently, take preventive measures to avoid risks.

Supporting continuous improvement

BPM analytics provides data-driven insights into quality processes and these insights help the organisation maintain a continuous improvement cycle. These insights can be used to implement best practices, optimise processes and identify opportunities for standardisation or automation, all of which will lead to improved quality.

Enabling compliance monitoring

By tracking adherence to regulations, industry standards and requirements, BPM analytics can help with compliance monitoring. Non-compliance issues can be easily identified and corrective actions can be taken too.

Analysing customer experience

Organisations can assess customer feedback by implementing BPM analytics and that can help in understanding the impact of quality on customer experience. Necessary steps can then be taken to improve any quality measures that are falling behind.  

To ensure that BPM analytics functions successfully and can be implemented for quality management, organisations must ensure they have an effective data collection and integration strategy in place. Actionable insights can be gained only if the analytics tools and techniques have relevant data to act on. This is most likely to happen when organisations foster a data-driven culture that encourages the implementation of analytics while making any decisions, and boosts collaboration between data analysts, quality management groups and process owners.

Choosing the right BPM and QMS platforms

The right platforms can be selected after analysing the organisation’s business objectives and existing process management tools and resources. Future requirements that could have an impact on organisational processes must be taken into account too. The process of selection must consider the opinions of all the stakeholders too to avoid future conflict. BPM analytics will work best when the best-fit platforms are selected and the data available is plentiful and accurate.

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