Business process management (BPM) has always been fenced in by the limitations of the latest technology. Even as new technologies such as automation and low-code development created new efficiencies and capabilities for organizations, the overall agility and flexibility that companies could achieve was fixed.

But those technologies have made great strides in recent years, and it has led to BPM undergoing innovation and transformation in many different directions all at once. Not surprisingly, businesses are more eager than ever to adopt BPM to enhance their own operations and provide better service and experiences to their customer bases.

In 2020 and beyond, a new generation of business technology is charting a new course for business process management and creating even more potential value for its adopters. Here’s a look at five trends that can have a direct impact on your own company’s success.

1. Machine Learning Shapes and Expands Process Automation

Automation’s potential applications in process management have been greatly expanded through the use of machine learning to support complex decisioning within a given task.

Automation has always offered value in collecting and transferring data, managing workflows based on if/then logic, and routing assignments and tasks to the relevant personnel based on simple criteria. Machine learning takes these applications much further, allowing data discrepancies and errors to be sorted out through automation and enabling a greater number of complex customer service inquiries to be resolved without turning to a human representative.

Image recognition, transcription, and predictive modeling are just some of the other ways machine learning can be used to automate tasks that previously required a human worker. This helps organizations reduce overall FTEs while applying human capital to more important tasks.

2. Improved Business Knowledge Through a ‘Single Source of Truth’

The “single source of truth” approach to data management goes far beyond ensuring consistency of that data. In reality, the “single source of truth” has much more to do with gaining reliable insights into your business operations and using that knowledge to implement better process management across a range of business activities.

With a single source of truth, your organization can improve support for many different aspects of operation, including IT maintenance, regulatory compliance, and business agility. Ultimately, this comprehensive and consistent information can be used to optimize processes across every department of your company.

3. Scalable Case Management Through Customized, Complex Flows

Rigid workflows provide a critical service for businesses, but they aren’t effective for managing individual cases where many different variables and factors can dictate the progression of that single workflow.

Process management is increasingly used to offer adaptive case management capabilities to these workflows, levering machine learning to build one-to-one case management capabilities that can be executed at any scale. No matter how individualized this process may be, emerging process management technology is able to offer a solution.

4. No-Code Becomes the Heir Apparent to Low-Code

Low-code has become a trendy development solution for businesses that want to offer fast, flexible development capabilities for their in-house development teams. But no-code is positioned to rise above low-code as a process management development tool for several important reasons.

Because no-code development is graphical in nature, it can offer drag-and-drop functionality that requires no coding knowledge whatsoever. Any professional can use this development software to build the exact solution they’re seeking—without the involvement of developers. This speeds up the development time for these new solutions, providing a quality, effective application in less time than even low-code can offer.

5. The Use of BPM to Support UX and the Customer Journey

Process management encourages a customer-centric approach to doing business. As businesses look ahead to the future, they’re hoping to use no-code development, intelligent automation, and other BPM innovations to improve the user experience on business applications and other customer-facing technology.

By extending the capabilities of process management to the end user, businesses can deliver a better customer experience along with the internal upgrades brought by BPM.

Future-Focused Business Solutions

Because it is aimed at creating new capabilities and improving upon existing business practices, process management is an inherently future-focused methodology. Business leaders can use BPM to recalibrate business processes and improve upon the status quo within their own organization.

To see how Decisions can help your organization, contact us for a demo.