Business Process Management: Business Excellence

Business process management (BPM) is a management discipline that focuses on improving corporate performance by managing and optimizing a company’s business processes. It can therefore be described as a “process optimization process.” It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach. These processes can impact the cost and revenue generation of an organization.

As a managerial approach, BPM sees processes as strategic assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and improved to deliver value-added products and services to clients. This approach closely resembles other Total Quality Management or Continuous Improvement Process methodologies and BPM proponents also claim that this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology. As such, many BPM articles and pundits frequently discuss BPM from one of two viewpoints: people and/or technology.

BPM Life Cycle

Business process management activities can be arbitrarily grouped into categories such as design, modeling, execution, monitoring, and optimization.

BPM technology

BPM is now considered a critical component of operational intelligence (OI) solutions to deliver real-time, actionable information. This real-time information can be acted upon in a variety of ways – alerts can be sent or executive decisions can be made using real-time dashboards. OI solutions use real-time information to take automated action based on pre-defined rules so that security measures and or exception management processes can be initiated. As such, some people view BPM as “the bridge between Information Technology (IT) and Business. In fact, an argument can be made that this “holistic approach” bridges organizational and technological silos.

There are four critical components of a BPM Suite:

  • Process engine – a robust platform for modeling and executing process-based applications, including business rules.
  • Business analytics — enable managers to identify business issues, trends, and opportunities with reports and dashboards and react accordingly.
  • Content management — provides a system for storing and securing electronic documents, images, and other files.
  • Collaboration tools — remove intra- and interdepartmental communication barriers through discussion forums, dynamic workspaces, and message boards.

BPM also addresses many of the critical IT issues underpinning these business drivers, including:

  • Managing end-to-end, customer-facing processes.
  • Consolidating data and increasing visibility into and access to associated data and information.
  • Increasing the flexibility and functionality of current infrastructure and data.
  • Integrating with existing systems and leveraging emerging service oriented architecture (SOAs).
  • Establishing a common language for business-IT alignment.

Validation of BPMS is another technical issue that vendors and users need to be aware of, if regulatory compliance is mandatory. The validation task could be performed either by an authenticated third party or by the users themselves. Either way, validation documentation will need to be generated. The validation document usually can either be published officially or retained by users.

Benefits

The benefits of using cloud BPM services include removes the need and cost of maintaining specialized technical skill sets in-house and reducing distractions from an enterprise’s main focus. It offers controlled IT budgeting and enables geographical mobility.

Applicability

Organizations belonging to these sectors are highly recommended to implement this standard so that they are able to achieve the same level of quality as required to compete in international markets; Textile Sector, Educational Sector, Information Technology Service Sector, Financial Institutions, Chemical Sector, Industrial Sector, Government Sector, Defence Sector, Professional Training Institutes, Food Sector, Pharmaceutical Sector, Steel Sector, Oil and Gas Sector, etc