Consultancy
10 Trends In Business Process Management Voor 2025Each year, the experts at BPM Consult traditionally map out the key trends in business process management (BPM). These are the ten themes that, according to the firm, BPM professionals should pay close attention to in 2025.
1: Business continuity takes central stage
More and more organisations are realising that working on business continuity goes far beyond buying an emergency kit or applying quick fixes here and there. Geopolitical tensions and new types of incidents are driving awareness of risks and mitigation measures to a whole new level.
Companies are discovering that high-level analyses are insufficient and are instead examining their value streams in depth to identify risks such as cyberattacks and system outages. They are recognising a well-designed process architecture as an excellent framework for business continuity analysis. Organisations that have fully integrated and designed their process flows are leading the way, while those that still need to strengthen their process architecture are struggling.
2: Customer experience becomes more intense
Many organisations have come to realise that the customer journey is crucial in determining whether customers are retained or lost. Those who still rely solely on product quality while ignoring the emotional experience are now in the minority. However, a growing group is accelerating its understanding of customer experience.
The key lies in scaling up sensory perception and enabling employees to experience it themselves. Service providers are introducing new gamification methods to improve service processes.
They are not only putting employees in the customer’s shoes, but also encouraging them to see through the customer’s eyes, hear through their ears, touch with their fingers and even smell through the customer’s nose. Simulation and virtual reality are gaining further traction and are being integrated with service blueprinting and customer journey analysis. In this way, the customer can be understood and served even better.
3: Prompt engineering as a new skill
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence continues to come with bold promises. Headlines and influencers predict impressive gains in labour productivity and a rapid decline in the need for human work. Yet, however intelligent AI may be, for now it cannot sense what a process truly requires, let alone design, implement and take over the work itself.
The critical key lies in the prompt, the instruction given to the intelligent assistant. Well-crafted prompts help the system understand what is actually needed.
And who is best positioned to tell AI precisely what a process requires? The process owner. Companies at the forefront are using their in-depth process knowledge to formulate high-quality prompts for AI, thereby gaining a competitive edge in applying AI within their work processes.
4: Coaching becomes more horizontal
Buzzwords such as continuous improvement, Kaizen, Lean and Agile are, for some companies, already considered outdated hypes that have been exhausted, do not work, or belong to the category of “things we did before Covid”. At the same time, there is a strong demand for change and growing dissatisfaction about how slowly it is happening.
Front-runners are discovering new drivers for adaptive organisations. They no longer deploy ‘improvement’ as a technique or a project, but as a core capability, and invest significantly in coaching to embed sustainable improvement within employees’ skill sets. This also brings about a new rhythm, not one of alternating between chopping wood and sharpening the axe, but one of continuous and integrated improvement.
The effect is that people support each other more effectively on the work floor, and improvement becomes everyone’s responsibility.
5: A new alliance between BPM, GDPR and cybersecurity
The need for data protection has grown too significant to be managed solely by a GDPR officer or added as a responsibility within IT. A clear understanding of everyone who processes personal data and how this is done is the first requirement. And which framework provides insight into data processing? Exactly, a well-designed process. Provided that it includes a workplace-specific level.
Organisations that have aligned their process and data architecture have long since put this in place. Those struggling with fragmented architectures or modelling at only one level still face a challenge.
However, any gap can be closed. By 2025, we will once again see strong partnerships emerging between process management, information management, and data protection, with a touch of AI taking on a monitoring role in cybersecurity. Alone you go faster, together you go further.
6: Supply chain management becomes more social
Value chains are set to benefit from new approaches. Traditional supply chain improvers who view supply chains as a linear logistical process will fall behind. Breakthroughs in the network economy demand a different perspective on the relationships within the value chain. Truly taking each other into account means understanding the social network.
Process managers are gaining new perspectives on processes and are pushing boundaries both in breadth and depth. They are investing in social network analysis and in understanding each other’s positions. As a result, the value of process management increases in perspective and value chains are elevated to a higher level.
7: Automating without proper organising; don’t do it!
Last year they were everywhere, and unfortunately they have already been spotted again this year: automation projects without any insight into the existing work processes. It simply does not work.
Applications are set up, employees receive button-training, and afterwards they are asked if anything is missing. This is followed by a polite ‘good luck with your new application’, after which they are left in complete uncertainty.
Front-runners take a very different approach. They invest in gaining a clear understanding of work processes, eliminate process inefficiencies first, then define requirements, base user acceptance tests on end-to-end order flows, and involve people closely in the transition from the current to the future way of working.
8: MS365 is gaining ground as a process ERP
Application landscapes still leave much to be desired. They are often characterised by patchwork solutions with significant gaps: sub-optimisation, isolated silos and makeshift integrations. In the past, MS Office offered little in the way of a solution, but with MS365 a new world of functionality has opened up, making it far easier to develop applications and workflows.
Organisations are increasingly able to take significant steps in automating their own processes independently. More and more are discovering this potential and are working with automated reminders, smart forms and structured task management. And all of this without requiring major additional investments.
9: Process implementation becomes more personal
The promotion of process-oriented working is traditionally based on sender-driven communication. Process models, expressed in technical jargon and standard notations, are presented to employees without much consideration. From a communication perspective, this approach has a low return: hearing something does not mean it is understood, let alone internalised. Communication therefore needs to take a different approach.
Digital assistants offer a solution, as they can explain how a process works in a tone, language and format that fully match an individual’s personal learning style. For instance, an accountant who enjoys comics might receive an AI-generated comic about booking invoices, while a teacher might be presented with their timetable in the form of a vlog. In short, process owners can leverage AI to support the personalised implementation of processes.
10: Digital handbook in SharePoint
Many organisations are moving away from digitised ISO manuals or process design tools towards clickable structures in SharePoint. This approach significantly reduces licensing costs and makes information accessible to everyone within the organisation.
