PurposeOrganizations rely on their business processes to achieve their business objectives and ensure compliance with relevant laws and regulations. Hence, conformance to process specifications is essential to remain compliant. Various factors influence an organization’s ability to operate in conformance to its process specifications. This study investigates the influence of business process management (BPM)-supportive culture and individual process orientation on process conformance.Design/methodology/approachA construct was created for perceived process conformance and two constructs were selected from literature to represent BPM-supportive culture and individual process orientation. A survey was conducted with 178 employees of a global enterprise, hypotheses were formulated, and a statistical model was constructed and validated.FindingsResults pinpoint the key role of the BPM-supportive culture in influencing both individual process orientation and conformance. Individual process orientation is also found to have a significant influence on process conformance. The findings provide additional evidence for the significance of human-related aspects of BPM in achieving BPM success.Originality/valueThe contributions of this paper help better understand how soft factors of BPM contribute to employees’ process conformance drawing on and relating concepts of BPM and organizational routines.