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 how to improve the performance of the enterprise by managing and optimizing its business processes.
This approach is the best thing that can 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 process. It makes companies more efficient, effective, and capable of executing changes than the functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach.
Efficient business processes have a positive impact on the cost and revenue generation of a company.
Business Process Management can also mean a software tool, technology suite, or information system to develop and deploy processes in the organization.
After doing that an organization is more adaptive. It is better able to respond to customer needs changes and change the business.
Business Process Management Life Cycle
As shown in the image, you see that it is a continuous process. Here we identify the generic steps of the cycle:
- Design - Design of business processes is about the identification of existing business processes and the design of "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 is about compasses tracking individual activities in processes, so that information on their state can be easily seen, and statistics on the performance of one or more processes can be provided.
- Optimize - Process optimization is about retrieving process performance information from the modeling or monitoring phase: identify and take away bottlenecks!
- Reengineer - Sometimes processes are not defined, described, or documented but they are problematic. In that case, it is best to interview people and use reports to chart and document a process. Every process in the organization should be diagrammed and documented. Else 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, it 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 said, you only need to analyze and redesign your business processes. But that can be very hard to do. But because of the benefits, it is always worth the while.
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. Use a reference model from your industry to start.
- 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 its 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 services.
- Business Agility - Increasing the quality of your products and making them consistent.
- Enabling the increase of your price because you can deliver better quality
- Compliance Easy - Improved and quicker reacting to changes in the environment.
- Customer Focus and Increasing customer satisfaction.
- Staff Satisfaction - It is more fun if you know exactly what to do.
Most Important Visualizations
There are 9 types of models and visualizations 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, showing all the business process architecture diagrams at once.
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