Introduction_to_Business_Process_Management
Organizations constitute of complex processes which connect together for it to function. These processes need to evolve over the period of time to meet the changing requirements. Business Process Management is an approach of aligning these small processes to form an entire business or segregating an entire business into smaller and self contained processes.
BPM gives the organizations an approach to efficiently evolve and optimize. BPM's evolution on the ground such as technology, innovation, process structure leads to a strategic asset held by the organization making it capable of growing at every time. BPM includes integration of technology operations, human interaction in the processes. Hence BPM is capable of modelling a process that involves technology with human intervention.
BPM follows a continuously evolving life-cycle.
1. Design: The first step to decide "What is to be modeled?". It could be an existing business process or previously designed model or projection of how a process should look. A good design should aim at reducing process complexity and improve its efficiency. Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a diagramming standard for drawing business processes. It’s a format that is understandable to business users because it looks like a flowchart.
2. Modeling: Modeling adds realistic measures to the Design created previously. It analyzes and projects feasibility and economics related to this project.
3. Execution: Automating the design and its model by the means of an application is Execution of the model. There are many software which enable execution is parts or completely, once such software which we are going to use is IBM Lombardi. These software are capable of capturing technology and human interaction together to depict business process.
4. Monitoring: BPM process provide the capability to analyze the entire business process as it goes through various states and understand any loopholes or lags. This gives the users the capability of troubleshooting the error. This process of monitoring business processes is referred to as Business Activity Monitoring(BAM).
5. Optimizing: Loopholes and bottlenecks observed during monitoring and changes desired in businesses need a continuous optimizations which follow the same cycle from the design to until further optimizations.
Re-engineering: Finally if the business process turns too costly to optimize and the scope of change is not profitable. Organizations need to re-engineer entire cycle for it to start producing profit and productive solutions.
Companies are adopting Agile Business Model i.e. ready to respond to challenges that come their way. BPM gives companies direct control over individual processes hence making it far more responsive business.
Improvement in productivity: Increasing output while reducing the input is every company's dream. A well structured company can achieve this dream.
Enhanced Throughput: Market thrives on new products and its share of the market. BPM lets companies bring ideas into reality and capture effective market share faster than its competitors.
Global Reach: BPM can be used as a tool to improve your production and supply chain to take your product over greater boundaries.
Compliance: Compliance issues cost a lot of money for companies, hence a well structured product and company can keep this cost under control.
Scope for Improvement: Every company, product or process should have a scope for improvement which is one of the design principles of BPM.
Investment < Profit Potential: BPM needs investment in both time and money but over a period of time its implementation in companies have proved it to be profitable asset.
Competitor never stops improving: The market is competitive for everyone and rule of thumb is always remember that competitor is improving every second.
Waiting won't improve things: Companies do go through rough times, but waiting for things to improve by itself does no good. BPM gives companies one tool analyze the biggest strength or the biggest weakness in their independent yet dependent processes.
Management needs figures to decide what's good for the company. BPM implementation may cost the company a big amount. For management to be convinced to adopt BPM, it needs to know a successful BPM process produces processes at lower costs, higher revenues, motivated employees, happier customers and hence a successful company.
Employees need to be on board for BPM because BPM indirectly outlines their workflow. Hence they have to work in a certain order and explaining how its a benefit.