How can you define Business Process Management (BPM) or define Process Management?
The definition of business process management (or BPM definition) as Dragon1 Term: A systematic approach and a field in operations management, focusing on improving the enterprise's performance by managing and optimizing its business processes.
This approach is the best thing to happen to your business or organization. It will increase your revenue and lower your costs!
Business Process Management is an area in operations management focusing on improving corporate performance by managing and optimizing the organization's business processes.
Also, BPM focuses on improving corporate performance by doing business process analysis for optimizing a company's business processes.
This approach can be seen as a process optimization. It makes companies more efficient, effective, and capable of executing changes than the functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach.
Efficient business processes positively impact a company's cost and revenue generation.
Business Process Management can also mean a software tool, technology suite, or information system to develop and deploy organizational processes.
After doing that, an organization is more adaptive. It can better respond to customer needs and changes, and change the business.
Business Process Management Life Cycle
As shown in the image, it is a continuous process. Here, we identify the generic steps of the cycle:
- Design - Design of business processes is about identifying existing business processes and designing 'to-be' business processes.
- Model - Modeling takes the theoretical design and introduces combinations of variables.
- Execute - Controlled manual and automated execution of activities in business processes (with human intervention).
- Monitor - Monitoring involves tracking individual activities within processes, allowing for easy visibility of their state and providing statistics on the performance of one or more processes.
- Optimize - Process optimization involves retrieving process performance information from the modeling or monitoring phase to identify and remove bottlenecks.
- Reengineer - Sometimes processes are not defined, described, or documented, but are problematic. In that case, it is best to conduct interviews and use reports to chart and document the process. Every process in the organization should be diagrammed and documented. Otherwise, it is uncontrollable.
First Basic Steps to Take
The BPM cycle can be chopped into four steps, as in the image below.
Either way, how you define or chop things always starts with DESIGN. You need to know what you are doing and what you should be doing: When, what, why, and how.
As simple as it can be, you only need to analyze and redesign your business processes. But that can be very hard to do. However, because of the benefits, it is always worthwhile.
Every journey starts with the first steps. So here are your first steps to take with regards to design and modeling:
- Step 1: Create an A0-sized overview, a process landscape of your current business functions, and cross-reference them with business processes. This is your as-is situation. Start by using a reference model from your industry.
- Step 2: Copy the overview and call it To-Be landscape. Identify and draw the most important process-starting events, outcomes, and business activities in the cross-reference matrix.
- Step 3: Point out where there are issues in your current processes
- Step 4: Look at the future products and services you want to deliver to future markets and clients. Write down what inevitably will change in the coming years.
- Step 5: Identify the new starting events and outcomes of your processes and top activities to create, produce, and deliver these products across the functions.
- Step 6: Take every business process, detail the description, and create an activity schema per business process.
With these steps, you are on your way to generating the benefits of business process management.
Top 7 benefits of Integral Process Management
It has proven the following benefits to be true:
- Cost Efficiency - Saving cost, easily up to 30% in your processes.
- Cutting down on preventable errors in customer service.
- Business Agility - Increasing the quality of your products and making them consistent.
- Enabling your price increase because you can deliver better quality
- Compliance Easy - Improved and quicker reaction to environmental changes.
- Customer Focus and Increasing customer satisfaction.
- Staff Satisfaction - Knowing exactly what to do is more fun.
Most Important Visualizations
9 types of models and visualizations are most important when doing BPM:
- Business Context Model (showing the parties involved)
- Business Stakeholders Model (Onion Diagram)
- Business Functions Model
- Business Process Model
- Business Activities Model
- Business Processes Landscape - An A0-sized overview of all your business processes cross-referenced with your business functions, showing the top events, outcomes, and activities per function and process. (optionally: with products, services, capabilities, competencies, and resources usage (applications)
- Business Process Model per business process
- Business Process Architecture Diagram, showing the concepts, principles, and elements of every business process.
- Business Architecture Diagram simultaneously shows all the business process architecture diagrams.
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