We all know how overwhelming starting a business is (if you don’t, try starting one – you’ll soon know!) There are many aspects of running a business you need to do right in order to support the whole operations.
As a big believer that lean startup approach is the way to go, I recommend you to go lean with your startup so that you are becoming more agile and adaptive to changes. Some of the ways to achieve those are by streamlining business processes, improving efficiency and achieving agility – in other words, doing better business process management (popularly abbreviated as BPM.)
BPM at a glance
In essence, BPM is a holistic management approach which aligns everything you do in your business with what your clients want. Manually manage this is near-impossible – so, to achieve this, you need a tool; a software, if you will.
There are so many BPM software available today, but surprisingly, not many support a lean startup’s need for flexibility and responsiveness to changes (read this white paper on the state of traditional BPMS.) If you are still considering your options, I strongly suggest you to read on.
With this blog post, I would like to take the opportunity to guide you to what I think one of the leading BPM solutions today, Comindware Tracker.
Comindware Tracker: Adaptive BPM
Comindware Tracker is an adaptive bpm software designed with what modern businesses need, which allows you build/manage business processes and collaborate with your team members in real time. It features everything you need in a BPM solution: Team collaboration, process tracking, and resource management.
However, Comindware Tracker’s real strengths beyond what is mentioned above. Offering what traditional BPM systems don’t, it can help your business, not only to manage processes, but also to implement changes into the processes in time without disrupting the entire processes. In essence, Comindware Tracker offers flexibility, which is the main reason it is a well-matched solution for a lean startup.
To elaborate, the benefits Comindware Tracker users can enjoy includes:
1. Quick to deploy, easy to use, accessible from anywhere
Comindware Trackers comes in two deployment options: Cloud-based or on-premise. For accessing the BPM solution online, the process from signing up to account provision only takes several minutes.
Process builder is graphical; process can be arranged via click-and-drag – you don’t have to allocate time and resources manually, as everything is well-taken-care-of by the system. If you do get lost, you can always ask for help from your dashboard.
Accessing your dashboard can be done not only via your laptop, but also from your mobile devices via its iOS and android apps.
2. Make changes on the fly
Running a lean startup means you need to be responsive to changes, any time. This is a major problem if your BPM solution can’t handle a disruption in the business process you have set up. You often need to rebuild the whole process to implement the changes – that is not ideal running a startup.
Fortunately, Comindware Tracker can help you solve the problem: It is designed to be flexible, which means it is adaptive to changes.
Your process control is in real-time, which means you can adopt any changes on-the-fly, without any disruptions or redeployment necessary.
3. Bird’s eye view on everything
You can monitor everything in real-time from your dashboard: Process workflows, tasks and processes collaboration/discussions, and task assigning. Everything is visible, so you won’t miss a thing.
4. Automate everything!
Comindware Tracker’s Workflow Engine makes task management a walk-in-the-park; it executes processes you create automatically by assigning tasks to the right team member, only after the previous step in the workflow is completed.
Furthermore, you can create forms visually, set your own workflow rules and have your data processed automatically.
5. Design custom apps
Comindware Tracker comes with essential, pre-built business apps for your business’ most-typical departments: IT ops, software development, finance and administration, marketing ops, compliance and policy, sales ops, human resources and education. However, as a lean startup, chances are you need custom apps.
You can easily address your lean startup’s needs by creative your own apps in minutes using the built-in visual tool with no programming required.
6. Connectivity with the software you are familiar with
Comindware Tracker works from the inside of your Microsoft Office Outlook. So, instead of going back and forth from one app to another, you can manage processes right from your Outlook.
If you are a Microsoft Sharepoint user, you may be interested in the fact that Comindware Tracker is not integrated with Sharepoint.
7. Enhance productivity with team collaboration
Without team collaboration, a BPM tool is incomplete. Comindware Tracker empowers your team members to collaborate on tasks and processes. You can discuss with your team members, as well as managing documents – all in real-time.
Getting started with Comindware Tracker
Getting started is very straightforward, really. As it’s only logical to make use of the available 30-day free trial plan, let’s sign up and see whether Comindware Tracker is for you.
To sign up for the online version, just click “Start Trial,” enter your details and click “Start Cloud Trial”
Your account will be immediate provisioned, and you can literally start using the tools in minutes. Logging in, you will be presented with a dashboard.
To start using Comindware Tracker, deploy the pre-built business process templates (e.g. HR or Finance.) Deploying involves just one click of your mouse. Just go to the Menu tab on the upper left corner and choose One-Click Solution Setup.
Installing an app will take about 10 seconds or so. To familiarize yourself, I recommend you to install all pre-built app and get some ideas on how to create a custom one yourself, if needed.
Verdict
Priced at $25/user/month, Comindware Tracker an affordable, yet powerful BPM solution.
The ease of use and flexibility of the solution are two key differential factors you need to consider when looking for a management software for your lean startup.
Perhaps the one and only reason why a startup should use Comindware Tracker is its ability in changing workflows in real-time during process execution without the need to interrupt it. As you are likely to make plenty of changes during the course of your startup phase, this is an ideal solution for you.
To learn more about Comindware Tracker, please go to http://www.comindware.com/tracker/