The biggest obstacle that small businesses face when adopting business process management (BPM) is usually themselves. The small business process is relatively simple, without scale and specification, which seems that business process management software for small business is worthless. Many small businesses are afraid of some professional software and terminology (SOA, SaaS, etc.), and feel that these have nothing to do with their own businesses. In fact, BPM software such as Yeeflow is not only applicable to large enterprises but also valuable to small businesses.
Most small businesses ignore their ability to grow and underestimate the value of effective management processes. They worry that BPM tools cannot improve work efficiency, but instead make themselves to invest a lot of money and energy. However, there are no companies that are too small to utilize BPM software. Even a company with only six people also has a financial system, sales department, and HR department etc. Many large enterprises that make good use of process management tools firmly believe that BPM software can have a significant impact on their management and culture from the beginning.
Three main factors need to be considered as follow
Small size business leaders should be willing to share information with others and be good at discovering and using more useful information in order to run the business better. The BPM tools are to automate business processes and better coordinate resources to improve performance. If companies with small size can use BPM software to coordinate resources, employees, computers, information flow, and more and more business policies and rules, they will turn their shortcomings into advantages.
The purpose of BPM software is to break the boundaries of the system, effectively integrating business on one platform, and serving the entire enterprise. Small size companies may not have such challenges because of their simple organizational structure and lower levels. However, the smaller the enterprise is, the easier they understand the end-to-end processes.
Before a small company purchases BPM tools，the analysis of one’s own business is essential.
For example, long-term inefficiencies in processing customer orders may pose risks to businesses. The operator of a small company must carefully monitor every link and find small faults in the process in time. Many operators will say, “We have been doing this”, but it may not work in the future. That’s why many small businesses gradually realize that the original control is slowly failing with the expansion of personnel, and it is no longer as easy to manage as it was on a small scale. Recognizing and discovering some management problems at the beginning is beneficial for you to expand the company and simplify more troubles in the future. Once you have sorted out a simple sales process, then even you are facing a container order in the future, it can be handled easily.
We usually recommend that small businesses first focus on the end-to-end process and define a goal for process improvement. And then they can identify the current obstacles to achieving the goal. Any business needs to start with an implementable plan and strategy, which is enough to prove that small businesses can use BPM software.
Before choosing a specific BPM supplier or software, first, ask the relevant experts, they may be able to recommend suitable BPM products for you. Of course, our Yeeflow has been successfully applied to many small companies. The practice has proved that after they use it for some time, their performance continues to grow. That’s why yeeflow has a very good reputation.
The introductory course to learn BPM in the early stage is very important. Yeeflow has a very detailed youtube video to teach you how to create forms and applications, and build your workflow, etc. Also, Yeeflow provides a 30-day free trial, which allows small companies to fully understand before purchasing.
To effectively use BPM tools, for small businesses, we do not recommend buying separate servers and embedded hardware and software. This is not only time-consuming but also expensive, and cloud computing is becoming an important new method for bringing automated processes to every small business. When contacting suppliers, small businesses should provide some ROI or total cost of ownership (TCO) forecasts to help evaluate BPM procedures.
It is advisable for small businesses to automate their process by BPM software. Our advice to small businesses adopting BPM software is: Although small companies do not need to start BPM plans at the beginning of their business, they must start thinking when they are gradually becoming standardized.