DeXpert: your Command on Change
   
 
 
 
     
  What is Business Process Management:
 
Business Processes Management (BPM) is the understanding, visibility and control of business process. A business processes represents a discrete series of activity or task steps that can span people, applications, business events and organizations. Based on this definition, the reader could logically relate BPM with other process improvement disciplines. That assumption is valid – there is certainly a described process (or methodology) that should be followed to help an organization to document their business processes and understand where they are being used throughout their business. During discovery, everyone agrees on how the current process is defined. The ‘as-is’ process’ is then used as a basis for determining where the process can be improved. However, simply documenting what the process look like does not give the business managers (those responsible for the actual results) control over the process.

The real value of BPM comes from gaining visibility and control of the business process. By applying technology, BPM software can activate the process, orchestrate the people, data and systems that are involved in the process, and give the business managers a view into how the process is operating, where bottlenecks are occurring and highlight possible process optimizations. Process operational metrics are automatically collected by the BPM software. Business metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) can also be measured to add specific process or organizational context to the data.

Armed with data on how the process is currently operating, business managers can use any process improvement technique to optimize the process. The next generation process will drive maximum performance and efficiency. The impact of an improved business process can be realized in many ways, including reductions in cost, improved customer satisfaction, increased productivity by allowing reallocation of resources to more value added tasks, or by compliance with industry or regulatory requirements.

Most companies are far from achieving this level of process capability. Business managers have limited visibility, especially for processes that may cross outside the borders of their department or outside the organization. Individual work activities may be processed in a first in – first out fashion, rather than being based on an optimized global prioritization. For organizations that have expanded or grown by acquisition, each business unit may perform similar processes, but each completing the work using specialized processes that don’t allow sharing of human and technology resources. Not knowing the current status of work paralyzes the business because managers cannot predict when work will be completed, who will complete it, if there are problems and how much the work is costing the company.


The term Process-Driven means that a person or organization has a passion for superior business performance through process innovation. Process-Driven organizations are those that understand how their work is getting done and focus on finding opportunities to make it better. They focus on the business and the results. They leverage technology, process improvement methodologies and best practices while embracing change to drive the processes that support their business. BPM is a business-oriented architecture that allows process owners to set improvement goals and orchestrate actions across the company to achieve those goals.
 
  The Elements of a BPM Solution

Typically the Business Process Management lifecycle has four elements:
 
Analysis and modeling of the current and desired business processes;
Automation of those process models;
Monitoring the performance of the automated processes and
Subsequently optimizing these processes.
 
   
 
A BPM improvement solution looks at business processes from their initial design, through to their automation, performance monitoring and ongoing optimization. New business process products, called Business Process Management Suites (BPMS), provide tools for graphically modeling and improving end-to-end business processes, including where those processes interact with existing systems.

Process analysts analyze the current business processes, looking at the flow of work, how IT is used to support the process, the motivation of staff, the physical environment in which work takes place, the roles, organization structure, skills and training of staff, and the policies and rules within the organization. Using graphical process models the analysts optimize the process design, looking for unnecessary manual steps, duplicate entry into multiple systems, unclear lines of responsibility and steps carried out in sequence that can be executed in parallel. They also focus on the ways to prevent errors occurring in the process (“right first time”) to reduce time spent on fixing problems after they are occurred happen. Finally, they specify target performance levels (in terms of cost, effort and milestones).

The BPM Suites do not simply document how you would like your business to run with graphical flow charts. Once the process model is complete, it can be deployed to a process automation engine for interpretation i.e. the model is executable, to use a technical phrase. The process automation engine takes the process model, interprets and then orchestrates the actual process, pushing work tasks to people and to systems, streamlining how the processes run across your entire organization.

Next, as the new business processes begin to operate within the organization, BPM suites provide a Business Activity Monitor to enable managers to monitor the ongoing performance of their processes. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are defined and the Business Activity Monitor gathers the information on the selected metrics. Most of these monitors can display performance information in real-time through graphical dashboards. Operational managers can quickly identify bottlenecks and drill-down to the causes of any performance problems.

Finally, having modeled, automated and monitored the business processes, a full BPM solution will also provide an Optimization component, that helps to continuously improve how a process performs, by changing process attributes to ensure more efficient execution. Usually the Optimization component has two aspects – it can suggest optimizations to your processes during operational execution (‘runtime’), e.g. by routing a backlog of tasks to another location or department; and it can suggest longer-term improvements to the overall process design based on observing the performance of a process over time e.g. remove a path in a process that is only executed less than 1% of the time.
   
  Achieving Agility through BPM:
  Furthermore, in today’s global business environment, operational excellence is measured increasingly by process responsiveness that is agility – rather than by efficiency. By itself, efficiency is no longer enough. BPM is the newest process management theory meant to address these new business realities. BPM’s disciplines largely are technology-enabled to better address today’s more unpredictable market dynamics by applying process management approach.