0 Business Process Management in brief....

Business Process Management is a process centric approach for improving business performance. It combines Information Technology with governance methodologies.

What is a Business process?

Business process is essentially a standardized way to convert a set of inputs into desired output that the customer would find valuable.

Example:
                 Loan application at a bank: Customer supplies an electronic application form to be picked up by the bank website. This information becomes the input to the loan application process. The business process itself made in consists of credit check and other activities, that enable the bank to make a decision whether to approve the loan or not. The output of the business process is a decision communicated to the customer followed by the money being paid into the correct customer’s bank account. We can say that business process transforms the several inputs into specific and more valuable outputs. In general, we can define the output of the process as output of everything that emerges from the process. The primary output is ‘what is desired by the customer’ in this case the money that they wanted to borrow. The secondary output describes ‘an email notifying the customer of the decision'.

Process flow:

                 The input to the process is provided by one or more suppliers are often in the form of information. The customer can be internal customer like manager of the bank or the external customer who applied for the loan. Even another subsequent process can be thought of the customer that is consuming the information created by the first process. Any entity that demands and consumes process output is considered as customer.

Three pillars of BPM:

Technology-People-Processes

                All three aspects need to work for a BPM project to be a success. The business process needs to be fit for a purpose and actually satisfy demands of all the stakeholders. The people aspect also need to work, if the customer neglects to provide all the required information, the webpage will alert him or her that the application form is incomplete. If a manager forgets to approve the certain process step, then he/she will get an alert. If he/she still doesn’t acknowledge it. The alert will escalate to her manager and so called “process owner” will also get an alert that the process is stuck. For the automation to work smoothly the information system need to work seamlessly for all of the time.

BPM Life Cycle:

Normally it takes a large team of experts with IT and Business knowledge to implement a BPM project. The project team will study related set of business process in great detail and redesign the business processes with the objective of optimizing it so that it is fit for the purpose. This happens during the design phase of the project. The processes are carefully designed and to be as simple and straight forward as possible so it can be completed in the shortest possible amount of time without making mistakes.

• During the modelling and simulation phase of the project, the process is documented in the form of an activity model. It is impossible to simulate the behaviour of the system and try out different scenarios through the What-If approach. Once the process is approved by the management it is deployed this occurs during the execution phase of the project.
• The project team will monitor the performance of the business processes to see if anything goes wrong. This is the monitoring phase.
• If any problems arise, changes will be made to further optimize the process to take care of exceptions this occurs during the optimization phase of the project.

References:

Garimella K. & Lees M. & Williams B. 2008. BPM Basics For Dummies. Indianapolis: Wiley.

Jeston, J. & Nelis, J. 2006. Business Process Management - Practical Guidelines to Successful Implementations. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.