Are you currently looking for a way to streamline your business and make it more efficient? You’re not alone. Many business owners are turning to business process management (BPM) tools to help them accomplish this goal and more.
In this blog, we discuss an overview of Pipefy – a top Workflow Automation and BPM tool, and its features, as well as some tips on how to use it effectively to streamline your business and boost overall productivity. But before we get to these, it’s important to understand the basics of workflow management and business process management.
What is Workflow Management and Automation?
As a business owner, you know that time equals money and every minute that goes by without maximum productivity is a wasted opportunity. Besides the ability to increase productivity, workflows optimize business operations by automating tasks and ensuring accuracy.
Oftentimes, workflow management and automation employ a variety of tools and technologies, such as software solutions, cloud-based systems, and machine learning algorithms. These tools are designed to help businesses automate tasks, reduce errors, and improve efficiency, creating the foundational structure of business process management. More on BPM as you read on.
What Is Business Process Management?
Business process management (BPM) is a systematic approach to managing and improving your business processes to enhance efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction. It is an umbrella term that encompasses activities such as automation, process improvement, re-engineering, monitoring, etc.
BPM, through the assistance of business process consultants, will streamline your processes by giving you visibility into each process and highlighting any inefficiencies. It also ensures that any changes you make to your processes are in line with the goals and objectives of your organization.
The Benefits of Business Process Management
Business process management offers several advantages, including:
- Enhanced Operational Efficiency: One of the primary benefits of BPM is its ability to streamline and automate workflows. By mapping out and analyzing existing processes, businesses get to identify inefficiencies, redundancies, and bottlenecks.
- Improved Process Visibility and Control: BPM provides organizations with a holistic view of their processes. Through process modeling and documentation, you’ll have a clear understanding of how different activities are interconnected and how they contribute to the overall performance of your team.
- Enhanced Customer Experience: Providing exceptional customer experiences is crucial for long-term success in any business. BPM will help you align your processes with customer needs and expectations.
- Agility and Adaptability: BPM equips businesses with the flexibility to respond to market dynamics and changing customer demands. It will place your business in a position to seize opportunities, respond to challenges, and stay ahead of the curve.
- Lower Cost: BPM helps to streamline workflow, eliminate redundancies, automate manual processes, and significantly reduce costs associated with these processes.
- Collaboration and Communication: BPM fosters collaboration by breaking down silos and promoting cross-functional teamwork. This leads to improved transparency, reduced miscommunication, and increased efficiency.
- Continuous Improvement Culture: BPM encourages a culture of continuous improvement within an organization. By regularly monitoring process performance, collecting data, and analyzing metrics, you get to identify areas that need improvement.
Go through our comprehensive resource to dive deeper into the world of BPM.
How Pipefy – a BPM Tool, Can Streamline Your Business Processes
Pipefy is a cloud-based business process management tool that enables business managers to create and execute workflows and ensure clear communication and efficient task management.
With Pipefy, organizations have the ability to:
- Create and manage templates for repeatable processes.
- Automate manual processes and eliminate redundant steps.
- Visualize and monitor each stage of the process.
- Track timelines and identify areas of improvement.
- Standardize procedures to ensure consistency and accuracy.
- Create collaborative workspaces for teams to work together.
Its dashboard provides full-scale visibility into your workflows and gives you a comprehensive view of your processes. With Pipefy, you’ll help your employees reduce manual errors, eliminate redundancies, and streamline your operations to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Key Features of Pipefy
Here are some of Pipefy’s key features that make it a viable option, if you intend to streamline your business processes:
- Flexible and Customizable Workflows
One of the standout features of Pipefy is its ability to help create and customize workflows in a matter of hours. Whether you have a simple task management process or a complex multi-step workflow, Pipefy provides the tools to design and adapt processes according to your business needs.
Its intuitive interface allows users to drag and drop elements, define tasks, set deadlines, and establish dependencies. Hence, providing a seamless workflow creation experience.
- Process Owner Autonomy
With Pipefy, you get to build workflows in real-time without the need for technical resources. This empowers process owners to take control and make changes as necessary, ensuring that workflows align with evolving business requirements.
- Integrations
Pipefy integrates seamlessly with other tools and allows businesses to connect with their existing stack through an open API. Integrations are often set up within minutes, without requiring technical skills and this provides a streamlined and interconnected ecosystem for data and process flow.
- Collaboration
Efficient communication and collaboration are essential for successful process management. Pipefy facilitates real-time communication within its platform, eliminating the need for lengthy email exchanges. It centralizes all communication threads related to the process, ensuring that all stakeholders have access to the latest updates and discussions.
This collaborative feature allows your team to work together seamlessly, both internally and externally with suppliers and clients. The platform also helps to maintain and track Standard Level Agreements (SLAs).
- Reporting
Measuring and analyzing key metrics is crucial for process improvement. Pipefy offers pre-configured metrics for productivity, average lead time, and cumulative flow, which are available for all processes built within the platform.
These reports provide valuable insights into process performance, bottlenecks, and areas for optimization. By leveraging these analytics, you’ll get to make data-driven decisions, continuously improve your business processes, and drive operational excellence for your business.
- Visual Management
Pipefy provides a clear and intuitive view of each process stage, a RASCI chart, deadline proximity, and action tardiness. This visual management feature allows process owners to have a comprehensive overview of the status and progress of their processes.
When you visualize the unique demands of each stage, you will be able to allocate resources effectively and ensure timely completion of tasks.
Getting Started with Pipefy
Getting started with Pipefy is easy. All you need to do is create an account, choose the process you’d like to manage, and get to work. Pipefy has many resources available to get you started quickly and begin creating basic process models and automating workflows. But if your processes are quite complex and you are keen on automating as much as possible, you should hire a business process consultant.
Learn the most important things to spot and ask when trying to hire a business process consultant
Here’s a summary of how to begin to use Pipefy.
1. Create an account – Creating an account on Pipefy is completely free. With a single sign-in, you’ll be able to access all of Pipefy’s features.
2. Set up processes – After creating your account, the next action to take is selecting the process you want to manage and defining the steps you want to execute in the process. Pipefy has a comprehensive template library that provides a wide array of pre-built workflows, or “pipes,” designed to streamline and optimize business processes across a multitude of functions and industries.
These plug-and-play templates, each customizable to match specific organizational needs, cover areas such as sales, project management, HR onboarding/offboarding, customer success, IT service desk, and marketing campaign management.
3. Assign users – Assign users to different stages of the process, define the roles they will play, and use insights to improve the process.
4. Monitor processes – Here, you can begin to monitor and analyze each process for inefficiency.
Final Thoughts
Streamlining business processes makes good business sense. You get to reduce complexity, speed up workflows, improve efficiency, and optimize activities. And to help achieve this quickly, Pipefy’s easy-to-use business process management tool is undoubtedly a great choice.
Get inspired by these case studies that demonstrate how companies across different industries have leveraged Pipefy’s business process management tool to overcome challenges, improve efficiency, and achieve their goals.
And if you’d like to promptly identify areas of improvement in your processes from the vantage point, and start building business-transforming and comprehensive workflows, you’ll need the help of expert business process consultants. That’s us and we’d be happy to help. Book a one-time free consultation with us today.
