Business Process Management Definition

Let us define Business Process Management

How can you define BPM? How do you use a business process management life cycle? Please read it here!

BPM definition

Business process management definition (or BPM definition) is 'A systematic approach and a field in operations management that focuses 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 to optimize a company's business processes.

This approach can be seen as process optimization. It makes companies more efficient, more effective, and better able to execute change than the functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach.

Efficient business processes positively impact a company's cost and revenue generation.

BPM 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 respond more effectively to customer needs and changes, and transform the business.

Business Process Management Life Cycle

Ultimately, your approach always begins with DESIGN. Understand what you are doing and what you should be doing: the when, the what, the why, and the how. This awareness helps guide your actions and decisions effectively.

As shown in the visualization, 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, providing visibility into their status and 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, 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

As simple as it can be, you only need to analyze and redesign your business processes. But that can be hard. Still, the benefits make it worthwhile.

Every journey starts with the first steps. So here are your first steps to take about 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 the 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 will inevitably 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 costs, 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 resource 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 shows all business process architecture diagrams at once.