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Real estate can learn from other industries to improve BPM

Ben Farrell
September 6, 2012

Business process management software can unleash major operational gains in a diverse range of industries. In many cases, the technology is used to automate many of the background processes that create tedium or distract employees from their core work. As a result, the technology plays a vital role in helping organizations from any industry improve operational efficiency and better serve customers.

However, the real estate sector has yet to fully embrace the technology, an oversight that should be rectified if the industry wants to improve moving forward, RISMedia reported. For the most part, real estate firms are only using the most basic BPM principles within operations, and those are primarily founded on manual processes that add extra time. This creates a situation in which even baristas selling $3 cups of coffee have access to automation through BPM solutions, but real estate agents brokering potentially multi-million-dollar deals do not.

The news source explained that in many major cafe chains, a barista takes an order for a drink and presses the corresponding button on the register. A BPM system running in the background then identifies the ingredients and instructions for that drink from a database and displays them near the machine that makes the product so the barista has all of the information in place. Ingredients are then added and mixed and the drink is delivered to the customer as quickly as possible, taking a relatively complex serving procedure that could include many steps and ingredients and simplifying it through basic process automation.

For real estate companies, similar process automation needs to be used. The report said that the transaction between brokers and customers has become a commoditized interaction that features a number of repeatable processes. Moving forward, how different organizations address this shift through BPM and similar supporting tools could separate the companies that are successful from those that fall aside because they do not offer the same levels of customer support.

Taking advantage of BPM solutions is not just about automating everything that can possibly run in the background. Though such an approach can remove the human factor from operations, BPM success in real estate or any other industry is actually about using automation to weed out the tedious or distracting processes and enabling employees to interact with customers or perform tasks more effectively.