Organizations of all
sizes are constantly forced to deal with the changing business environment.
The changing marketplace, technological advances, and shifting customer
priorities create challenges that businesses must overcome every day.
All successful organizations need efficient processes to convert their
competencies and resources into value for their customers. Success
requires a delicate balance between establishing efficient, repeatable
processes, and maintaining the agility to adjust or completely replace
these processes to fit current conditions.
Common challenges include
the following:
People acting in concert
The actions of good managers, along with prior training and experience, largely determine
how effectively members of a group can work together to bring about an aggregate result.
Yet all of these factors take time to develop, and might never fully develop if the
pace of change is high. A well-designed process management system can help by orchestrating—by
way of notifications, reminders, delivery of resources, and tracking—the work of many
individuals involved in a business process. It can also automate much of the start
up and cleanup in each individual
activity. For example, it can automate finding the right forms and locating relevant policies,
or automate forwarding to the next person in the process.
Interleaving automation
Not all processes can
be usefully automated, but even partially automated processes are
more efficient than completely manual processes. A well-designed process
management system can help identify where automation can have the
highest impact, along with an operational framework for deploying
and managing automated processes.
Performance analysis and optimization
High-level summary
results can indicate problems, but detailed analysis is required in
order to pinpoint and fix bottlenecks and inefficiencies in operations.
A properly implemented process management system can collect detailed
metrics on the actual performance of key processes in real time. These
metrics give management a concrete basis for making decisions about
how and when to make improvements.
Business process management
(BPM) is a disciplined approach focused on aligning all aspects of
an organization on fulfilling the needs of its clients. It emphasizes
integrating technology into the business process such that the process
itself drives the business goals, decoupled from the underlying systems
and applications. Specifically, BPM emphasizes how the work is done
within an organization, in contrast to what a product does.
BPM can also be used
to understand relationships between processes; relationships within
the organization and across organizational boundaries. The analysis
of those relationships, when included in a process model, allow sophisticated,
horizontal reporting and analysis.
Critical success factors
for BPM include the following:
-
understanding the current state
business process and client needs
-
applying governance and standards
based on business policies and practices
-
using metric and key performance
indicator (KPI) definitions that support measurable business goals
More specifically, a
business process is a collection of activities designed to produce
a specific output for a particular objective, possibly involving both
human and system interactions. Essentially, a process is an ordered
sequence of work activities defined with respect to time and place,
with a beginning, an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs:
a structure for action.
Initially, BPM focused on the automation of business processes. It has evolved to
integrate manual processes in which human interaction takes place in series or parallel
with the use of technology. For example, when individual steps in a basic
workflow require human intuition or judgment, these steps are assigned to members within the
organization. Consequently, the difference between workflow and BPM is not distinct.
Generally, workflow management is considered to be a subset of BPM that emphasizes
static routing and administration of human tasks. In contrast, a business process
might include a combination of automated and manual activities with dynamic routing
based on embedded business logic. Today, many products include varying aspects of
customization and control, but both approaches emphasize the elimination of bottlenecks,
minimization of redundancies, and improved operational efficiency.
In short, workflow systems can be thought of as a type of operating system for the
enterprise. The function
of this system is to orchestrate and track work, whether automated or carried out
by humans. In the same way that databases capture what an organization consumes and
produces, workflow systems encapsulate how the organization operates.