What can Business Process Management do for your Business?
Business process management or BPM refers to the process of lining up every aspect of the workflow in an organisation in a way that it meets the requirements of the clients. In other words, it is a holistic approach towards the management of business processes. This ensures efficiency and effectiveness of the workflow and improves the way the processes work.
A business process comprises of a network of activities that are all directed towards the achievement of the organisations’ business goals. A managerial approach considers that business processes are like strategic assets that should be comprehensive, easily manageable and should ensure delivery of quality services and products. This approach is quite akin to the Continuous Improvement Process or a Total Quality Management process.
BPM or business process management activities can be broadly classified into five different categories. These include designing, modelling, implementation, supervision and optimisation.
The first stage is process design that includes the task of identifying the ongoing projects and creating the design for the processes that are about to be initiated. The areas of focus include the representation of the workflow, the people who are involved in it, notifications and alerts, service level agreements, escalations and the standard operating procedures. A proper design would ensure that half of the problems that exist today would be solved for the future.
Modelling for the project includes the theoretical design and specification of the business processes involved. This requires a tool to graphically represent the processes within a complete business process model. The next step in the process is that of implementation. There are automated processes that are used for the development an application that can execute the different steps of the process. One other approach that is frequently adopted in this case is that of a combination of automated and human processes.
The next step is that of supervision or monitoring. All the individual processes are tracked to check whether they are working the way they are meant to. One such instance of tracking that is frequently used is to determine the status of a business order so that the problems that might surface are identified at once and subsequently corrected. The degree of monitoring largely depends on the kind of information that you wish to procure from the business. You can also analyse the way the business can be monitored in near real-time, in real time and on an ad-hoc basis.
Process optimisation is defined as the task of gathering process performance details from the monitoring stage and the identification of impediments, bottlenecks, or duplicate and unnecessary processes. Albeit that the number of steps involved in any one process might vary from one organisation to another, this method of streamlining, or even eliminating, each step offers great scope for significant cost savings and performance improvements.
A BPM suite comprises four critical components. These include:
- Business Analytics: These empower managers to check the trends, business opportunities and the identification of business issues.
- Collaboration Tools: Inter and intra-departmental communication issues are sorted through dynamic workspaces, discussion forums and message boards.
- Content Management: It is a system for the storage and security of electronic data and thus enables effective document management .
- Process Engine: A robust platform meant for the execution of business rules and process-based applications.
Technology has indeed made the administration of business processes simple and effective. Many organisations initiate business process management to optimise areas of the business that have been identified as ones that have adequate scope for improvement.
Author Bio: Bruce Chable is a business consultant and is consulted by people when it comes to the effective management and administration of their business processes. He advocates the implementation of BPM or business process management for proper streamlining of business activities.
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