A practical guide to understanding BPM maturity, the levels organizations progress through, and how to assess and strengthen BPM capabilities across governance, documentation, data, technology, and continuous improvement.
BPM maturity describes how well an organization manages, standardizes, improves, and scales its business process management practice. It reflects the strength of an organization’s BPM capabilities across people, governance, methods, technology, and continuous improvement. Higher maturity means BPM is not only practiced but embedded into daily operations and decision-making.
BPM maturity shows how consistently processes are documented, reviewed, measured, and improved. At lower maturity levels, BPM work is ad hoc and dependent on individual effort. As maturity grows, organizations introduce governance, shared standards, dedicated roles, and supporting tools that make BPM more systematic and sustainable.
Maturity is also a key factor in scaling BPM practice. Organizations with well-defined roles, stable documentation standards, automation readiness, and reliable performance data can expand their BPM initiatives faster and with less friction.
These capabilities directly influence how effectively teams can implement the BPM strategy—discovery, analysis, design, implementation, and optimization—across departments.
BPM maturity and business process maturity are related but not the same:
You can have a mature process (e.g., a highly automated procure-to-pay workflow) within a low-maturity BPM organization. Conversely, you can have strong BPM governance while some processes are still being standardized.
Understanding this distinction helps organizations avoid assuming that excellence in one process equals overall BPM maturity.
Understanding BPM maturity dimensions is essential because they form the foundation for evaluating how well an organization manages, governs, and improves its processes. Each dimension represents a core capability area that influences the organization’s ability to scale BPM practices and execute its BPM strategy effectively.
Below is a deep dive into the key dimensions used in BPM maturity assessments.
Governance defines how process responsibilities are assigned, how decisions are made, and how changes are controlled. It is one of the strongest predictors of BPM maturity.
Without clear ownership and governance, even well-designed processes fail to stay up to date or aligned with business needs. Mature governance ensures that process management is not optional—it becomes part of how the organization operates.
What elements does it include?
This dimension evaluates how well processes are captured, structured, and maintained. High-quality documentation enables transparency, onboarding, consistency, and collaboration across teams.
As maturity grows, organizations move from ad-hoc diagrams to standardized process models with clear relationships, inputs, outputs, and supporting systems.
What elements does it include?
BPM succeeds only when teams actively participate in designing and improving processes. This dimension evaluates how embedded BPM is in daily work and whether teams see process management as part of their responsibilities.
Culture becomes especially important when BPM expands across functions, requiring shared standards and joint decision-making.
What elements does it include?
Measurement is central to BPM maturity. This dimension assesses how well the organization defines, captures, and uses process performance data.
Mature BPM practices rely on KPIs, dashboards, and mining insights to support improvement decisions and validate the impact of changes.
What elements does it include?
Technology enables BPM to scale beyond manual documentation. This dimension evaluates the tooling landscape supporting modeling, workflows, integrations, mining, and AI-assisted analysis.
As maturity increases, organizations shift from fragmented tools to more integrated BPM platforms that support end-to-end lifecycle management.
What elements does it include?
Continuous improvement determines whether BPM becomes a sustained practice rather than a project. This dimension evaluates how consistently processes are reviewed, improved, and aligned with changing business requirements.
High maturity means improvement is systematic, supported by data, and embedded in team routines.
What elements does it include?
Each BPM maturity level represents how consistently an organization defines, manages, measures, and improves its processes. The descriptions below expand on what each stage looks like in practice, including real-world examples of how organizations operate at each level.
At this level, BPM is informal and highly inconsistent. Processes differ between individuals, and most work relies on tacit knowledge rather than shared standards.
A typical example is a customer onboarding flow where each employee follows a slightly different sequence because nothing is documented. HR might still manage leave requests through email chains, and finance approvals are handled through ad-hoc conversations instead of defined steps.
When issues arise, teams troubleshoot reactively because no one has a clear view of how work is supposed to happen.
Some BPM structure begins to form. Teams start documenting selected processes, often prompted by audit requirements or local efficiency efforts.
For instance, a sales department may standardize its lead-to-opportunity process, while HR models its onboarding steps but doesn’t maintain them regularly. A finance team might track approval cycle times manually, but other departments still rely on informal routines.
The organization understands the value of BPM, but adoption varies widely.
BPM becomes structured and predictable across the organization. Documentation is consistent, governance is defined, and teams collaborate more easily because processes are visible and standardized.
Typical examples include order-to-cash being fully documented and reviewed quarterly, HR maintaining a standardized onboarding flow across regions, or procurement modeling all its purchasing workflows in a single repository.
Performance data begins to guide decisions, and BPM is recognized as a core operational discipline rather than an optional task.
BPM is embedded in daily operations and supported by strong measurement, automation, and analytics.
For example, a bank may monitor its loan-processing workflows with real-time mining dashboards to detect deviations. A global manufacturer might automate large portions of its quality-control workflows, while customer service teams use process data to adjust staffing levels dynamically.
BPM is no longer a project but an operational standard across the organization.
BPM is a strategic capability. Processes are continuously optimized, deeply measured, and strongly aligned with business and transformation goals.
Organizations at this level operate with predictive insights—for example, a logistics provider automatically adjusts routing workflows based on forecasted delays, or a retailer refines fulfillment processes using AI-driven demand predictions.
Improvement is embedded in how teams plan, execute, and scale their operations.
Organizations assess BPM maturity in two primary ways:
Both approaches aim to understand how consistently processes are governed, documented, measured, and improved. The right method depends on available data, process complexity, and current BPM maturity.
Manual maturity assessments are common in early-stage BPM initiatives or organizations with limited tooling. The assessment focuses on gathering qualitative evidence about how processes are managed today.
A manual assessment typically includes:
This approach works best when organizations are still stabilizing the basics—governance, documentation, and ownership. It provides a clear picture of cultural and structural gaps but relies heavily on subjective input. Findings may vary depending on who participates and how accurately teams describe their work.
Manual assessments are especially useful for identifying foundational issues before introducing more advanced BPM tooling or analytics.
As organizations progress, a tool-supported assessment provides a far more accurate and scalable way to evaluate maturity. Platforms like SAP Signavio combine documentation, governance workflows, process mining, and performance dashboards, allowing teams to base assessments on actual execution data instead of assumptions.
A tool-supported assessment can include:
Tool-supported assessments provide a continuous view of maturity, not just a one-time snapshot. They allow organizations to measure improvement results, monitor trends, and update their maturity level over time.
This approach becomes essential when the organization reaches Managed maturity (Level 3) or higher because manual interviews alone cannot provide the depth needed for operational accuracy.
Most organizations use manual assessments to identify governance and documentation gaps and tool-supported insights to analyze performance and execution quality.
Together, they form a complete picture of BPM maturity.
Get the most important standards, ready for you to modify and adapt according to your own organizational needs.
