Business Process Management (BPM) – At a glance

1.     Are you interested in Robotics Process Automation (RPA)? If yes, then you must be aware about BPM.

2.     Do you know BPM?

3.     Are you aware life cycle of the BPM?

In such case, this article will help you to articulate Business Process Management (BPM)

Drafting, outlining, managing and monitoring business processes is a huge challenge in most of the organization. Businesses are not investing enough efforts for streamlining their business processes due to lack of awareness and homework within the organization.

Business Process Management is an integrated approach, a holistic overview of the operational process across the department – an end to end process. In the organization very, few individuals have visibility to see an entire process, individual department or silo approach can able to see only half piece of the process. Business process management is to see the full effect and impact of the processes, where its starts and ends, the prerequisite conditions, the key required data, and where is the potential bottlenecks and inefficiencies to cover. Chaotic, unorganized and miss-managed business processes can hurt to an organization silently through invisible way and can lead to mainly following scenarios;

Challenges in absence of BPM

Following are the key challenges have been experienced and identified by the various organizations

1.     More errors: As data volume increases, probability of the human errors increases

2.     Blame game: In case of any data dependency or identified data errors, blame game started between the organization units.

3.     Time waste: It requires additional non-productive time to reconcile and verify data across the organization level and between the organization units

4.     Demoralized Employees: In connection with the recurring reconciliation tasks employee’s moral level and productivity level decreased which impact directly on the organization level productivity.

5.     Lack of Data: Recurring data reconciliation exercise, human error corrections generate impact on data authentication issues and data unavailability within time frame which impacts directly on forecasting of business strategical decision.

Life-cycle of the BPM

• Design : Outline the processes each business unit wise, identify processes which are running across the business unit. Distribute the responsibilities to collect data and distribute in the workflow. Define approval authority to ensure authentication of the data and process elements.
• Model: Draft the processes into cross unit diagram to conclude the exact process flow and various tasks in a sequential manner. Freeze the deadlines (SLAs) between the business unit to accomplish the processes.
• Execute: Categorized the business processes between 3 categories 1) Simple 2) Complex and 3) Business essential. Execute the designed and agreed business processes to ensure and note business process outputs.
• Monitor: Keep eyes on the running processes to identify bottlenecks, analyze efficiency and performance between business unit.
• Optimize: During the monitoring of the running business processes, focus on the flow of the processes, identify the processes which can be enhanced further either automating some business rules or handling business exceptions cases.

Key Elements of the BPM

• Document: Business processes which are dependent or rely on the business documents such as Purchase Orders, Supplier Invoices, Agreements, Contracts etc.,
• Human: Business processes which are required human interventions to take certain decisions (which is not business rule based and can change case to case basis) Additionally human interventions are required to monitor running business processes, identify business processes which can be improved further to achieve business goals.
• Integration: Business processes which are running across multiple systems (business applications) such processes are inputs from one business units and output to another business units. Usually, such business processes identify between operational business units and finance business unit. In such case, integration required between systems (business applications) to exchange data between the systems.

Benefits with BPM