Business Process Management explained

Corporate re-engineering emerged in the early 90s, when organizations engaged in streamlining and downsizing to lower operational costs. Today, many organizations are cutting their technology budgets to survive, yet automation and business process management boost productivity, realize savings and bloom in a harsh business environment.

Business Process Management involves the effort of organizational alignment with customer needs and requirements. In the business world real-time business processes are complex. As this complexity increases and additional integrity controls are required to assist the customers' sophisticated behavior, it becomes essential to design, implement, and document this behavior using a visual assembly methodology. To achieve that, Business Process Management views organizational effectiveness and efficiency with a focus on innovation, flexibility and integration with technology.

A process-managed organization applies a pioneer approach that fosters ongoing collaboration between information technology and business users aiming to collectively build applications that integrate people, processes and information effectively. Through a systematic approach to the business processes of a firm, Business Process Management manages to optimize processes that involve human interactions with the use of Web services and the employment of straightforward integration technologies such as XML, BPEL, BPMN and others.

Advantages

1/ Focusing on improving the agility and operational performance of an organization through the control of business processes, Business Process Management assists organizations to offer products/services that their customers perceive as solutions to their individual problems. So, products are priced based on their value as solutions, not on their cost to produce and this helps organizations to thrive on change and uncertainty.

2/ As firms strive to achieve their organizational objectives, Business Process Management focuses on the continuous improvement of processes so that flexible organizational structures are tied to the requirements of different and frequently changing customer opportunities. Continuous process change is achievable through the deep knowledge of the process and improvement capabilities.

3/ Business Process Management embeds Six Sigma quality and shrinks growing costs across the value chain. It assists the organization to pursue strategic initiatives, including mergers and acquisitions, outsourcing, alliances, consolidation and global expansion, with transparency, management control and accountability.

4/ The process-managed organization gains control of business processes and it corresponds with a common process technology enabling partners to execute on shared vision and manage the entire lifecycle of their business improvement initiatives.

5/ Through Business Process Management, the impact of people and the knowledge they possess is leveraged to organizational mission in order to offer incentives or employee responsibility, adaptability and innovation. So, the Business Process Management team has to be motivated to make quick and effective decisions. These factors make the business owners more suitable to lead and drive Business Process Management initiatives, with facilitation, examples and integration support provided by IT.

Challenges

The implementation of Business Process Management necessitates constant participation from key business users and analysts during the development of process models and the implementation of supporting application elements. However, many business users and IT people are not used to a continuous collaborative approach to implementing software. This makes planning, training and change management essential features of successful Business Process Management implementation

Another potential challenge in Business Process Management is the behavioral change required by participants in the process. Often, Business Process Management necessitates users to move from an event-driven to a task-driven work paradigm. So, implementing Business Process Management may require a major cultural transformation related to organizational planning and strategy implementation.