Business process management (BPM)

BPM refers to Business Process Management. It is continual management of business processes like designing, optimizing, documenting, communicating, deploying, monitoring, updating and terminating unwanted processes. It is systematic approach toward making an organization's business Life cycle effective, efficient and more capable to adapt an ever-changing needs and demands of client. A business process can be anything from processing a customer order, to business approval procedure, to procurement in organization, to on-boarding a new employee. These processes are critical to any organization as they generate revenue and often represent significant proportion of cost. Business process is nothing but set of steps to be followed in our day to day work activities that is performed to accomplish a desired outcome. BPM is also referred as a "process optimization” that helps in realizing organizational goal and thus can impact the cost and revenue generation of an organization.

Today there are many workforce and business system inefficiencies which can lead to problems such as customer dissatisfaction, poor quality of service, unnecessary costs etc. The reason behind these issues and problems may be due to poor understanding, improper management of day-to-day work activities.

BPM Lifecycle 

The Business process management consists of different 5 phases.

Figure 1: Wikipedia BPM Life-cycle

Design:

In design phase, a review of the existing business process is done or a new one is created if required. It consists of Business Activities, Core processes, Process groupings, Business flow, Operational flow etc. Based on these activities a business flow chart is prepared with roles and responsibility of the actors, escalations level, predefinition of SLA and SOP etc. A good and efficient design helps to reduce the number of problems over the lifetime of process.

Modeling:

In modeling we capture business processes at a high level to understand how business is working and what the pain points are in existing process. Main focus is to ensure that the high level details are correct, how to implement model is separate question which is not focused at this stage. Here we figure out what are the factors that need to be considered while modeling process (e.g. changing a software or procurement of new hardware will determine how the process might operate under different circumstances).

Implementation/Execution:

This is where you put your ideas into action. The process can be executed manually or automatic. Automatic Process like the available or custom made application that executes the required steps of the process. Manual process like the detailed training to the organization on new process or change in the existing process. In real time the automatic approach may not execute all the steps of the process accurately or completely.

Monitoring/Testing:

The executed process performance is measured here. Individual processes need to be tracked so that the effectiveness of the implementation can be measured and accurate data can be provided to all stakeholders. This helps in evaluating how effective the implementation was and if tweaks need to be made. Management can monitor business activities in real time to detect process bottlenecks and take prompt corrective action. E.g.  Monitoring fine tune delivery of services to ensure that SLAs are met, in application support or call center how quickly a customer query is processed or how many queries were processed in the last month. These measures gives you a brief of process cycle time, defect rate and productivity.

Optimization:

Process optimization includes retrieving process performance information from monitoring phase; identifying the potential or actual bottlenecks and the potential opportunities for cost savings or other improvements; and then, applying those enhancements in the design of the process. This will helps organization to monitor the resources (time, money, people) taken to accomplish each activity in the workflow and accordingly optimize the process.

An effective process implementation can help to understand wastage in efficiencies and ways to streamline and improve processes.

About Author:
Manish Chandak  is social media enthusiast and works as consultant with Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. He actively contributes to the areas of technology and Information security. He can be contacted at: manish.c@spluspl.com