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Best business process management software in 2024

Rebecca Noori 9 min read
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Is your business stuck in a rut, carrying out the same processes day after day because “that’s just the way we do things around here?” Unfortunately, stale business processes seldom achieve great results. Instead? You can expect frustration, low productivity and lack of growth.

That’s where business process management software is invaluable. BPM tools take a magnifying glass to every step in your processes and highlight where the problems and solutions lie. This guide explores five popular BPM systems in the market, and introduces monday work management to keep you organized.

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What is business process management (BPM) software?

Business process management is the practice of documenting, analyzing, and improving a company’s processes to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and achieve business goals. To simplify these tasks, business process management software keeps everything automated and streamlined, enabling companies to manage their operations and adapt to changing market conditions. With the right tools in place, organizations can:

  • Optimize their workflows
  • Improve collaboration between teams
  • Gain valuable insights into performance metrics.

Take customer onboarding as an example. Without BPM software, welcoming new customers would involve manually collecting customer contact data, setting up their account, sending follow-up emails, and tracking their activity as a new buyer. BPM software streamlines these tasks to create a smoother, more impressive introduction to your customer brand.

Top 5 business process management software

Your choice of business process management software typically comes down to the budget you can afford, the features you require, and how other customers have experienced a particular product. Check out these five popular options to select the best pick for your organization.

1. monday work management

Save valuable time and get new projects started faster by automating crucial elements of your work, like creating templated project boards or sending approval notifications and reminders.
Best for: Teams of any size
Top features:
- Resource management & time tracking
- 27+ visual work views
- Integration with 200+ third-party apps
- Automations & AI-tools

Pricing:
Free plan available.
Plans starting from $8/user/month

See all monday.com pricing plans here

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2. Asana work management

Asana workflow board
Best for: Task-focused workflows
Top features:
- Task tracking with multiple views
- Integration with other tools
- Task dependencies & automations

Pricing:
Free plan available.
Plans starting from $10.99/user/month

Read full review: Asana Review

3. Trello

A screenshot showing Trello's task management software.
Best for: Visual small teams
Top features:
- Kanban-style boards with lists, and cards
- Checklists and due date setting
- Commenting and tagging teammates

Pricing
Free plan available.
Plans starting from $5 per user/month

Read full review: Trello Review

4. Wrike

Wrike board
Best for: Workflow management
Top features:
- Document management
- 400+ app integrations
- Customizable workflows

Pricing
Free plan available.
Plans starting from $9.80/user/month

Read full review: Wrike Review

5. Smartsheet

Smartsheet board
Best for: Dynamic spreadsheets
Top features:
- Grid-, calendar- and work views
- Automates calculations across sheets
- Strong reporting features
- Spreadsheet export

Pricing
Free plan available.
Plans starting from $7/user/month


Read full review: Smartsheet Review

Why use software for business process management?

As with any technology, BPM software brings speed, accuracy, and convenience to the table. But this is just scratching the surface of how software can organize and oversee your key business processes. Other benefits include:

Process modeling and design

Your software allows you to plot specific processes using graphical representations, whether linear, as a flowchart, or a more complex form of chart or diagram. Visualizing the steps involved in your process lets you identify inefficiencies and adjust accordingly. You can also simulate processes before implementing them in real-time.

Real-time monitoring of specific processes

BPM software provides tools for real-time monitoring and analysis of business processes. By setting triggers and sending notifications when specific actions occur, organizations can easily track performance and make quick data-driven decisions to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

Compliance and standardization

Applying a consistent approach to your processes ensures you execute them the same way each time. This is key to complying with regulatory standards and internal policies, which is critical for quality control and risk management.

Agility and flexibility

Real-time data allows you to respond quickly by adapting your processes to changing market conditions. For example, you might redesign your software development process to quickly bring a new product to market.

Improved customer experience

Improved internal processes translate into better customer experiences, which is key for the 79% of customers who expect consistent interactions with your company. BPM software is a great solution, allowing you to map out various customer experiences, such as onboarding, buyer journeys, upgrades, and customer services, to create a frictionless experience for your customers.

How do your internal teams benefit from business process management software?

  • Operation managers optimize resource allocation, enhance overall operational efficiency, and plot out processes covering everything from supply chain management to product inventory management.
  • IT managers integrate their BPM system with the rest of their tech stack to ensure data security and compliance standards.
  • Senior executives gain strategic insights from data analytics, aiding in informed decision-making and long-term planning.
  • Customer service teams can review processes related to queries and complaints to improve response times and improve overall customer satisfaction.
  • Project managers efficiently plan, track, and manage project tasks, timelines, and resources.
  • People leaders can design HR processes like payroll, offboarding, or grievance management to facilitate better team collaboration and support your workforce.

What to look for in business process management software

BPM tools offer extensive features and functionality that may or may not suit your business. It’s easy to get distracted by the breadth of choice available, but try to focus on a few core features that are available in quality software. All of the below are available on monday work management.

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  • Team collaboration: When your processes involve multiple people or teams, you’ll need a central location to manage conversations, feedback, and brainstorming sessions. monday work management is a collaborative space for teams of any size to connect and share ideas. Employees can attach messages to specific board items, pull in conversations from email or direct messaging apps, or share extensive text blocks in monday workdocs.
An example of team collaboration in monday.com
  • Customizable views: Business processes come in many shapes and sizes. For example, you may need to view your procurement process completely differently from your payroll process or present both in a preferred format to your C-suite. monday work management allows you to see your work your way. Set up a customized dashboard to pull in the data that matters to you and display your tasks and workflows using a range of views, including Gantt, Kanban, Calendar, Timeline, and more.
Screenshot showing automated procurement business operations in monday Work Management.
  • Resource management: Maximize process efficiency by ensuring you have the right resources available. From planning and scheduling project budgets and timelines to balancing workloads across your team, monday work management is the perfect platform to keep everything organized.
An example of the Workload view in monday.com
  • Requests and approvals: Human-centric processes typically require sign-offs from managers, leaders, or adjacent departments involved in the workflow. monday work management streamlines this essential data collection with built-in custom forms and project approval processes to ensure everything is signed and dotted on time.
A screenshot of request and approvals forms in monday Work Management.
  • Integrations and automations: Your software becomes even more valuable when it syncs up with other tools in your tech stack. You might wish to integrate your BPM software with Google Drive, time-tracking tools, messaging apps, or project management software. Monday work management offers native integrations with 72+ other tools, enabling you to create simple automation recipes to streamline your workflows. For example, you might send an automated email to an IT manager when an employee raises a new helpdesk ticket.
An example of the integrations available in monday work management.

monday work management: A versatile business process management software

There are multiple types of business process management software in the market, and it’s worth researching and comparing a handful before you invest in a specific platform. We’d recommend considering monday work management, an all-in-one space to visualize, understand, and enhance any type of business process for any type of team or organization.

Mid Yorkshire NHS Trust had previously used a 43-tab spreadsheet to manage its budgeting process, which took hours of manually crawling through the data. Associate Director for Digital Services Kat Poole explains the success of moving the process to monday.com.

“We put together a process whereby we can score each of the schemes and prioritize them, we can assign people, we can update statuses, and we’ve filtered the dashboards by years. It’s just so much easier on monday.com.”

Ready to revamp your business processes, weed out inefficiencies, and improve key experiences for internal employees and customers? Take a free no-obligation trial of monday work management today.

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FAQs

The "best" business process management software depends on the specific needs and preferences of each individual company. It's always worth researching different options, including monday work management which scores 4.7 out of 5 with the G2 software community.

Organizations of any size use processes to manage their business, so it follows that anyone could make use of BPM software. However, smaller companies or one-person organizations may be tempted to use alternative methods, such as simple project management software or a manual approach to process documenting. Remember that manual process management will be more challenging as you scale.

Yes, business process management can be categorized as a methodology. Typically, it involves several stages related to planning, analyzing, designing, monitoring, and optimizing processes. BPM fits Agile frameworks well, allowing businesses to quickly adapt to changing priorities or market needs.

The information provided in this article is accurate and up-to-date at the time of publication. Changes and updates in the business operations, policies, or any other relevant factors may occur after publication and we encourage readers to verify any information directly.
Rebecca Noori is an experienced freelance writer who specializes in writing and refreshing long-form blog content for B2B SaaS companies. When she's not writing, you'll find her knee-deep in phonics homework and football kits, looking after her three kids!
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