BPM software has always been known for being clunky and hard to use. Despite this, it’s an essential tool for any organization that wants to excel at process management. Taking full advantage of BPMS, however, is far from easy: to make even the most basic changes to your apps (or processes), you’d need the help of a specialized engineer. To make the process easier, BPM provides have been focused on developing low-code platforms, which allow users to create apps with extreme simplicity.
The Need for Low-Code BPM
BPM software has been around for a while – it’s been a must-have for enterprise companies since the 1990s.
And the reason for this is crystal clear. Process management and improvement provider a lot of different benefits for your organization.
- Process Enforcement – Formal BPM processes enforce protocol. i.e, your employees will follow whatever rules you set up for the process.
- Agility – Without BPMS, you’d need to spend a lot of time on convincing your employees to do things in a certain way. With the software, you can simply make adjustments to the process & your employees will simply follow new protocol
- Improve Company-Wide Productivity – As a result of the first two, your company becomes more productive, which leads to higher profits.
While this does sound amazing on paper, though, it often doesn’t hold up in practice. Getting BPM to work isn’t easy.
To begin with, the software is hard to set up – you’d need to spend months looking for the best deal, and even longer for your software provider to install it for you.
Let’s say you already went through the initial trouble of installing the software – you’d think that you’re half-way there. Well, not really. Actually getting your company to use the software is a whole different dilemma.
See, from a user experience perspective, most BPM providers tend to have a very big drawback. They’re…
- Hard to Use. You would actually need to train your employees on how to use any given BPM software. It’s a known fact that tech adoption is already hard for your employees – they won’t be too happy if your BPM software will take weeks to learn and make sense of. To make sure that the BPMS is used, you’d have to monitor your employees, which is a hard task on its own.
- Hard to Customize. To make any changes to your processes, you’d need the help of specialized software engineers. So, if you mess up something when setting up the processes, you’ll end up paying a bunch to have them fixed.
So now you have 2 whole new problems to deal with. Because of this, some companies tend to simply forget about their new BPM software, call it a sunk cost and move on.
Using low-code BPM software, however, can help solve both of these problems.
Low-Code BPM
For the past few years, most BPM software providers have been focusing on developing low-code capabilities. i.e software that doesn’t require almost any development experience to use. Depending on the software, this is done through different means. Some use BPMN2 with drag & drop graphs. Others, such as Tallyfy, have their own proprietary process design model.
The simple user experience allows your organization to create and modify apps without any intervention from the C-suite – it’s as simple as your average task-management software and can be used by just about anyone. This, in turn, makes BPMS setup much easier & yields results that were previously impossible.
The following table describes the main differentiators between the two platform types…
Low-Code vs BPM | ||
Low-Code | BPM | |
| Setup Time | Instant registration (usually cloud-based) | Up to 6 Months (more often than not, on-site) |
| Process Setup | Customizable process templates + drag & drop design. Apps created and deployed in minutes | Need to be programmed during the setup phase. Hard to change afterward. |
| Pricing | Avg. 10 USD / Month / User | 6-figure installation fee + yearly subscription |
| User Experience | Minimal coding needed. Apps can be developed and used by regular employees | Special training + IT help for configurations |
| Integration | API integration with 3rd party SaaS software | Limited depending on the solution. Addons require installation by software provider |
Conclusion – Low-Code is the New BPMS
Looking at the benefits offered by Low-Code BPM, it’s pretty nonsensical to even consider the hassle of adopting old-school BPM software.
Low-code allows you to build apps within minutes, rather than months. The traditional BPM adoption process – months of planning, researching and development – is replaced with a simple 5-minutes registration.
So, why don’t you give low-code BPMS a try?
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