1. What is the importance of BPM for business? Why should companies be interested in BPM solutions?
I define BPM, the concept of business process management, as a big picture-oriented management approach. You can only reveal the big picture when you determine the business processes well. As businesses grow whose business processes are not well managed, and as their processes become more complex, the big picture disappears and decisions begin to be made at the function level. Profitability and growth, as the main goals of the business, are interrupted by competing functions, bottlenecks in processes, inefficiencies and inadequacies. On the other hand, if the business processes of an enterprise are well defined and data is recorded at the right points throughout the flow, decision-making becomes easier; more and error-free outputs can be produced with less resources; employee satisfaction increases as the roles in all processes from the first input to the last output become clearer; change management becomes easier and all functions start to work with a focus on profitability and growth, which is the main goal of the business.
2. What is the size of the BPM market in Türkiye and how do you evaluate the growth of this market?
Created on the basis of the needs of large-scale companies, BPM products have also targeted medium-sized companies with their reduced investment costs and easy application features in recent years. According to the 2022 data of the Turkish Statistical Institute, the number of large-scale workplaces with more than 250 employees is 6 thousand, while the number of medium-sized workplaces with 10 to 250 employees is around 280 thousand. In this respect, we can say that the market has grown almost 5 times, but I think that even this does not fully reflect the growth scale of the market. In the past, the size of the company had a linear proportion to the number of employees, but today, with digitalization, the workplace no longer provides sufficient information for the number of employees, business volume and process complexity. From this point of view, I think that among the 2 million small-scale workplaces with 10 or fewer employees, the number of workplaces included in the BPM market is not small at all.
Another factor in the growth of the market is the pandemic. During the pandemic, many companies experienced remote working. Companies that realized the inefficiency of working remotely with processes that only run on e-mail and phone have started to be interested in digital transformation and BPM products. BPM products are no longer seen as the need of large-volume companies with complex processes such as manufacturing, but have also become the need of all workplaces that focus on measuring work efficiency instead of working time. I think that almost all small and medium-sized companies that want to consider flexible working options that include remote working will start using a BPM product over time.
3. Can you explain the relationship between digital transformation processes and business processes? What role does BPM play in these processes?
If we define the business processes of businesses as steps that transform input into output, we can define digital transformation as acquiring the ability to leave a digital mark on a workplace at all critical steps. In this respect, to collect the data we call digital traces, it becomes a necessity to manage business processes digitally at the level of business steps detail with products such as BPM. I don’t think it is possible for a business that doesn’t use BPM to complete its digital transformation.
4. What are the main challenges businesses face when implementing BPM solutions? What are your suggestions for overcoming these challenges?
When the business cultures of businesses are based on employee memory, the first challenge in BPM solution implementation projects is to reveal business processes. Employees may have difficulty in stepping the work they have been doing for many years in detail, and in case of situations that need improvement, they may show resistance due to going out of their comfort zone. At this point, the determination of senior management, ensuring employee participation in the restructuring and implementing change management strategies are very important. Another challenge is to shift the workflow culture of the workplace from the focus of departmental goals to the big picture, that is, the goals of the core work being done. Here, too, abandoning all practices that will support departmental competition, designing business process flows from the perspective of the customer without making any distinction between departments, and realizing this transformation through search meetings on the basis of employee participation provide a more permanent cultural change as it enables everyone to look at the same picture from a different place.
5. What are the biggest benefits of BPM projects to businesses?
I think that the biggest benefits of businesses thanks to BPM are that they can produce strategies with the goal of profitability and growth, identify the problems that arise before they grow, and implement the appropriate solution quickly, since they are focused on the big picture at the contradictory and compromised points that may arise in the processes.
6. How should businesses in Türkiye adopt BPM technologies and start this process?
Today, it is possible to find BPM products for the different needs of businesses of all sizes. Determining the right product for the needs of the business is a very critical step in this respect. When the product is right, implementation and sustainability become easier. To determine the right product, first of all, the project steps must be determined to solve the problems and to meet the needs of the enterprise. The level of detail at which there is a need for process management, the information technology infrastructure and product management skills of the enterprise, and the size of the team that will manage the product are important criteria in the creation of the right project and, accordingly, in the selection of the right product. Of course, cost is also an important criterion, but at this point, when determining the cost, not only the purchase cost but also all operational costs that may arise during the management of the product should be taken into account. After product selection, I think that making a realistic time planning according to the size of the project and adopting a change management in which employee participation is essential with the goal of cultural change instead of the goal of implementing it as soon as possible are critical issues for businesses to get maximum benefit from BPM technologies.
7. What trends have been observed in the BPM market around the world in recent years?
We can observe that the habit of using a single product that meets all needs alone is decreasing around the world. The new trend is that instead of a single product, businesses create their own product combinations by buying different products from different service providers for each need. Of course, the spread of technologies such as Cloud, SAAS and API has a great impact on this. Thanks to these technologies, all of these products can be managed as if they were a single product by transferring data to each other from a single platform. With this trend, as I mentioned before, the market has been able to expand to medium and small-sized companies.
Medium and small businesses, which can no longer afford the high cost of a single product, are also encouraged by products such as BPM. A small-scale business that has not even used a resource planning product yet can choose to start with a BPM product and add new products to the product platform step by step in line with their needs.
8. What do you expect in the BPM market in the future? In what directions do you think it will evolve?
I expect these trends to grow the BPM market very quickly in the future. Thanks to the no-code platforms of BPM products, we see that it has evolved from being a ready-made product prepared for the needs to a place where the user prepares his own product. I expect this to become very widespread. Just as a person who establishes a company now can quickly prepare his own website, I think that in the future, he will immediately become a member of a BPM platform with his credit card information and start using it by quickly preparing his own workflows.
