Every company engaged in a productive activity has a business process. Depending on the company and its objectives, they can be more or less complex, but there are always stages of the process that must be fulfilled to give continuity to the company's activity. To optimise the process in each of its stages, a support strategy is business process management (BPM), understood as a discipline that uses various methods to improve the operation of the company in all the stages that make up its business process, from the creative phase to the relationship with customers.

However, the implementation of a BPM in an SME depends firstly on how relevant the tool is considered and secondly on the specific needs of the organisation. For example, an SME that needs to strengthen workflow monitoring may prefer a people-oriented BPM. On the other hand, if compliance with certain legal regulations needs to be monitored, a document-oriented BPM may be more appropriate. Regardless of the type of BPM that is installed, there are multiple benefits derived from its application, such as increased production efficacy, automation of repetitive processes, or streamlining of sales processes. This shows that, for any stage of the business process that is improved, there will be an overall improvement in the functioning of the SME.

As this is a wide-ranging tool and its installation is complex, it is recommended to follow a step-by-step approach with the help of a specialist team, internal or external to the SME, that is capable of performing tasks such as quality control, data analysis or solution design. These phases are goal planning, process modelling, pilot testing, evaluation and continuous improvement.

Although it is a tool that can cover an entire organisation, there are areas where its impact is more noticeable. Some departments that can particularly benefit from BPM are content creation through workflow management in content production, customer service through the centralisation of contact channels between the customer and the SME, and human resources thanks to document verification of employees and candidates.

There are many BPM solution providers today, but some of the most popular are as follows:

• Pipefy: ideal for creating workflows.
• Elozku: specialises in integrating with financial management and accounting applications.
• Cflow: capable of integrating with more widespread platforms such as Office 365 or G Suite.
• Monday: used to create and monitor workflows.

In short, the use of BPM can mean a significant increase in efficiency, effectiveness and accuracy in the business processes of an SME, using the organisation and monitoring of work and each of the stages of the business process as a maximum.