BPM in 2026: from paper to intelligent workflows in Spanish companies

Why BPM is relevant again right now

Business Process Management (BPM) has been present in the language of business management for decades, but its practical application has changed significantly in recent years.

For a long time, talking about BPM meant thinking about long projects, complex platforms and implementation processes that were difficult to justify outside large corporations. Today, however, many medium-sized companies can approach process improvement initiatives with a much more gradual, accessible and results-oriented approach.

Change isn't just technological. It's also a matter of approach.

Instead of trying to model the entire organization before acting, many companies are opting for a more pragmatic approach: identifying the processes that generate the most friction, redesigning them with the level of complexity strictly necessary and progressively automating them, validating the impact at each step.

In Spain, different studies on business digitalization continue to suggest that a significant part of medium and large companies maintain processes that depend, at least in part, on manual intervention, coordination by email and shared spreadsheets. More than an anomaly, this reflects a fairly widespread reality and, at the same time, a clear area for improvement for many organizations.

What is BPM and what it isn't

BPM can be understood as the discipline of managing business processes in a structured way: documenting, measuring, redesigning and continuously improving them.

It is not a specific software.
Nor is it a single closed methodology.
And it's not equivalent, on its own to RPA or artificial intelligence applied to processes, although both approaches can form part of a larger BPM strategy.

Part of the confusion surrounding the term comes precisely from there.

When a vendor talks about their “BPM platform”, they're usually talking about software.
When a consultant talks about “implementing BPM”, they usually refer to a transformation methodology or program.
And when an operations management says they need BPM, often what they're pointing out is something simpler and more useful: that their current processes don't work as smoothly as they should.

From that point of view, BPM should not be understood as an abstract technological category, but as a way of approaching a very specific question: how to make important company processes clearer, more measurable and less dependent on manual labor.

A business process, in this context, is any sequence of activities that transforms an input into a useful result. This can be the management of an order, the approval of a purchase, the addition of a new employee or the resolution of an internal incident. Whenever there are steps, managers and an expected result, there is the possibility of managing it with a BPM logic.

Traditional BPM and Current BPM: What Has Changed

For years, many BPM projects followed a clearly top-down approach: first complete processes were modeled, then validated with multiple areas and, finally, implemented on specialized platforms. This approach made sense in certain contexts, but it also generated long, costly and, at times, excessively theoretical projects.

The main problem was that the time between the design and the actual validation of the process was too long. When the workflow finally reached the users, often the context had already changed or the design didn't faithfully reflect how the organization actually worked.

In practice, the approach that tends to work best in many companies today is quite different.

The current BPM tends to be more incremental and closer to the ground. Instead of trying to map the entire company, a process with clear friction is selected, pragmatically redesigned, automated within a reasonable time frame, and the result is measured before expanding the scope.

The difference is no small: it's not just about implementing faster, but about learning sooner.

The type of tools available has also changed. Traditional BPM platforms required specialized profiles and dedicated technical teams. Today, there are workflow automation solutions that cover a significant part of the use cases without the need for a heavy platform or an expert team in a specific stack.

That doesn't mean that any process can be automated without complexity. It means, rather, that the entry point is more accessible than it was a few years ago.

Processes that many companies usually start with

The best starting point will always depend on the context of each organization. Even so, some recurring patterns tend to appear in medium-sized Spanish companies.

Approval of expenses and purchases

It is usually one of the first candidates because it combines volume, financial impact and relatively clear structure.

In many organizations, this process continues to rely on poorly traceable emails, calls, spreadsheets, or approvals. Precisely for this reason, it is usually one of the processes where basic automation can provide visible results in a short time.

Management of internal IT incidents

The internal helpdesk is also often a good entry point.

It's a process with relatively clear rules, high volume, and easy-to-follow metrics. When ticket classification, assignment, and scaling are automated, many organizations see significant reductions in response times and manual operational burden.

Employee Onboarding

The incorporation of new people to the company usually involves HR, IT and the receiving team.

When the volume of registrations is significant, the manual process can consume a significant amount of time. A structured workflow allows you to coordinate tasks, record states and reduce informal dependencies between teams.

Contract Management

The creation, review, validation, signing and archiving of contracts usually involves multiple steps and managers.

In organizations with a certain contractual volume, automating this cycle can help reduce waiting times, improve traceability and provide more visibility on the status of each document.

Financial and operational reporting

Another common area is periodic reporting.

In many companies, data consolidation and reporting continues to rely on repetitive and poorly scalable tasks. Automating part of this flow can significantly reduce monthly effort and improve information consistency.

How to get started: a practical approach in four weeks

The value of BPM is usually not in the theoretical model, but rather in the ability to bring a first case to production with reasonable speed and real learning.

Week 1: Diagnosis

The first step is to identify which processes generate the most friction.

The most useful way to do this is usually very direct: talk to teams and ask which tasks consume the most time, generate the most errors or require more manual coordination.

At this point, it's best not to assume that management already knows the answers. In many organizations, the most expensive bottlenecks aren't necessarily the most visible from the top.

Week 2: Selection and Redesign

Once several candidate processes have been identified, the most sensible thing to do is to choose one that combines two criteria:

• sufficiently visible impact
• reasonable complexity for a first iteration

The next step is to map the current process and design a simpler version. In many cases, before automating, steps that do not provide real value should be eliminated.

A useful rule here is simple: if it's hard to explain why a step exists, it probably deserves to be reviewed.

Weeks 3 and 4: construction and pilot

With the defined flow, a first version of the workflow is built and tested with a small group of users.

The objective in this phase is usually not perfection, but rather to obtain real evidence: to see if the process works better, if it reduces manual work and if users adopt it.

This learning is, in many cases, what makes it possible to justify a second automation with more trust and less internal friction.

Bibliographic references

[1] National Observatory for Technology and Society (ONTSI). (2024). Business Digitalization Barometer 2024. Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service. https://www.ontsi.es/es/publicaciones/barometro-digitalizacion-empresarial-2024

[2] Gartner. (2024). Magic Quadrant for Process Orchestration Platforms. Gartner Research. https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/process-orchestration-platforms-mq

[3] Association of Business Process Management Professionals (ABPMP). (2023). BPMCommon Body of Knowledge (BPM CBOK) Version 4.0. ABPMP International. https://www.abpmp.org/page/BPM_CBOKv4

[4] Forrester Research. (2024). The State of Business Process Automation in Europe, 2024. Forrester Reports. https://www.forrester.com/report/state-business-process-automation-europe

[5] Camunda. (2024). State of Process Orchestration Report 2024. Camunda Services GmbH. https://camunda.com/state-of-process-orchestration

[6] N8ngGmbH. (2024). n8n documentation: Workflow automation guide. https://docs.n8n.io

‍