Strategic Business Process Modelling

Business Process Modelling seems so difficult, especially when you have undergone sharp rise in Operations over past years

Lately this has become one of the most common statement when I am interacting with my customers. I could empathize with their concerns related to the Business Process Modelling initiatives. The concerns are mainly with the:

1. Costs and Time involved in modelling the business processes
2. Accuracy needed to clearly outline the correct information
3. Accessibility to intended user personas
4. Correct depiction of Compliance, Regulations, Customer Service Agreements, if in place
5. Keeping the Model up-to-date

Out of many other challenges around Process Modelling initiative the above challenges take priority and requires to be addressed before commencing with such a strategic move.

I would be going through on this topic in my following series of posts to cover the essential elements of Effective Business Process Modelling, Holistically addressing key modelling challenges and Guidance to establish organization wide acceptable modelling framework.

In this article, I will go through with the key benefits of effective modelling of business processes.

Why Business Process Modelling?

Business Process Modeling is a combination of various process-related steps — such as process mapping, process discovery, process simulation, process analysis, and process improvement — aimed at improving business performance by optimizing the efficiency of connecting activities in the provision of a product or service.

In last few decades, BPM has replaced previous organizational efficiency practices, such as the TMS — Time and Motion Study and TQM — Total Quality Management.

There are several key advantages of introducing Business Process Modelling as essential element of any strategic initiative of an organization.

1. Aligned business strategy with Operations— Implementing a business strategy or new business model requires changes in the operations and the way people perform their work. Business process modeling facilitates this by helping managers and executives ensure that business processes are consistent, and enable business execution toward achieving the overall strategy and goals of the organization.
2. Efficient Process Communication — Having a very clear idea of what should be done, how it is supposed to be done, and what the exact role of every team member entails, represents key factors that lead businesses and teams to success. Business process modeling enables the documentation and communication of an organization’s business processes. It provides a common, unified language and methodology for communicating processes, information and guidelines about the processes; it minimizes the loss of business process knowledge (for example, as a result of a loss of staff); jump-starts the organizational process documentation initiative; and, allows for rapid knowledge transfer with thoroughly documented processes.
3. Better control and consistency — Successful companies and organizations also attach high importance to well-designed business processes and rules to ensure that they are consistently applied the same way every single time. Business Process Modeling makes this possible, as it provides the formalization of existing processes that may not be well-documented, eliminates guesswork, and ensures that these documented processes follow the company guidelines and legal regulations.
4. Streamline operational efficiencies — The process simulation and analysis steps of BPM provide understanding of the process flows and helps managers determine if there is room for further optimization, improving the process cycle time, enabling better resource utilization, and allowing modeling of the process before actually implementing it, thus minimizing disruptions.
5. Achieve competitive advantage — All the benefits mentioned above lead to a significant competitive advantage for an organization that has invested the time and effort to document, simulate, constantly refine, and improve its business processes. A business that has aligned its operations with its strategy, is agile, has control over its processes, runs efficiently, and has a well-trained staff, is likely to be performing at its best.

In the next post, I will go through with the ways to effectively model the business processes in the variety of situations leading to the multiple value chain(s).