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:
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 startup (for example, finding the right forms,
locating relevant policies and procedures, and so on) and cleanup
(for example, forwarding to the next person in the process) in each
individual activity.
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 actual performance of key processes in real time, giving
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.
Moreover, BPM can be
used to understand relationships between processes – both within
the organization and across organizational boundaries – which,
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 automation of business processes, but it has evolved to integrate
manual processes in which human interaction takes place in series
or parallel with the use of technology. For example, in basic workflow
systems, when individual steps in the business process require human
intuition or judgment to be performed, these steps are assigned to
appropriate 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 sort of operating system for the enterprise,
whose function 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.