Business process management
Business process management is the discipline in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business processes is BPM. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, enabling technologies are often used with BPM.
As an approach, BPM sees processes as important assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and developed to announce and deliver value-added products and services to clients or customers. This approach closely resembles other total quality management or continual improvement process methodologies.
ISO 9000:2015 promotes the process approach to managing an organization.
...promotes the adoption of a process approach when developing, implementing and
improving the effectiveness of a quality management system, to enhance customer satisfaction by meeting customer requirements.
BPM proponents also claim that this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology. Therefore, multiple BPM articles and scholars frequently discuss BPM from one of two viewpoints: people and/or technology.
BPM streamlines business processing by automating workflows; while RPA automates tasks by recording a set of repetitive activities performed by humans. Organizations maximize their business automation leveraging both technologies to achieve better results.
Definitions
The Workflow Management Coalition, BPM.com and several other sources use the following definition:The Association of Business Process Management Professionals defines BPM as:
Gartner defines business process management as:
It is common to confuse BPM with a BPM suite. BPM is a professional discipline done by people, whereas a BPMS is a technological suite of tools designed to help the BPM professionals accomplish their goals. BPM should also not be confused with an application or solution developed to support a particular process. Suites and solutions represent ways of automating business processes, but automation is only one aspect of BPM.
Comparison with program management
It can be differentiated from program management in that program management is concerned with managing a group of inter-dependent projects. From another viewpoint, process management includes program management. In project management, process management is the use of a repeatable process to improve the outcome of the project.Comparison with project management
A key distinction between process management and project management lies in repeatability and predictability If the structure and sequence of work are unique, then it is a project. In business process management, a workflow can vary from case to case due to gateways, conditions, and business rules. The key is predictability: no matter how many forks in the road, we know all of them in advance, and we understand the conditions for the process to take one route or another. If this condition is met, we are dealing with a process.Changes
The concept of business process may be as traditional as concepts of tasks, department, production, and outputs, arising from job shop scheduling problems in the early 20th century. The management and improvement approach, with formal definitions and technical modeling, has been around since the early 1990s. Note that the term "business process" is sometimes used by IT practitioners as synonymous with the management of middleware processes or with integrating application software tasks.Although BPM initially focused on the automation of business processes with the use of information technology, it has since been extended to integrate human-driven processes in which human interaction takes place in series or parallel with the use of technology. For example, workflow management systems can assign individual steps requiring deploying human intuition or judgment to relevant humans and other tasks in a workflow to a relevant automated system.
More recent variations such as "human interaction management" are concerned with the interaction between human workers performing a task.
, technology has allowed the coupling of BPM with other methodologies, such as Six Sigma. Some BPM tools such as SIPOCs, process flows, RACIs, CTQs and histograms allow users to:
- visualize – functions and processes
- measure – determine the appropriate measure to determine success
- analyze – compare the various simulations to determine an optimal improvement
- improve – select and implement the improvement
- control – deploy this implementation and by use of user-defined dashboards monitor the improvement in real time and feed the performance information back into the simulation model in preparation for the next improvement iteration
- re-engineer – revamp the processes from scratch for better results
research on BPM has paid increasing attention to the compliance of business processes. Although a key aspect of business processes is flexibility, as business processes continuously need to adapt to changes in the environment, compliance with business strategy, policies, and government regulations should also be ensured.
The compliance aspect in BPM is highly important for governmental organizations. BPM approaches in a governmental context largely focus on operational processes and knowledge representation.
There have been a number of technical studies on operational business processes in the public and private sectors, but researchers rarely take legal compliance activities into account—for instance, the legal implementation processes in public-administration bodies.
Life-cycle
Business process management activities can be arbitrarily grouped into categories such as design, modeling, execution, monitoring, and optimization.Design
Process design encompasses both the identification of existing processes and the design of "to-be" processes. Areas of focus include representation of the process flow, the factors within it, alerts and notifications, escalations, standard operating procedures, service level agreements, and task hand-over mechanisms. Whether or not existing processes are considered, the aim of this step is to ensure a correct and efficient new design.The proposed improvement could be in human-to-human, human-to-system or system-to-system workflows, and might target regulatory, market, or competitive challenges faced by the businesses. Existing processes and design of a new process for various applications must synchronize and not cause a major outage or process interruption.
Modeling
Modeling takes the theoretical design and introduces combinations of variables.It may also involve running "what-if analysis" on the processes: "What if I have 75% of resources to do the same task?" ''"What if I want to do the same job for 80% of the current cost?"''.
Execution
Business process execution is broadly about enacting a discovered and modeled business process.Business process
Enacting a business process is done manually or automatically or with a combination of manual and automated business tasks. Manual business processes are human-driven. Automated business processes are software-driven. Business process automation encompasses methods and software deployed for automating business processes.Business process automation
is performed and orchestrated at the business process layer or the consumer presentation layer of SOA Reference Architecture. BPM software suites such as BPMS or iBPMS or low-code platforms are positioned at the business process layer. While the emerging robotic process automation software performs business process automation at the presentation layer, therefore is considered non-invasive to and de-coupled from existing application systems.One of the ways to automate processes is to develop or purchase an application that executes the required steps of the process; however, in practice, these applications rarely execute all the steps of the process accurately or completely. Another approach is to use a combination of software and human intervention; however this approach is more complex, making the documentation process difficult.
In response to these problems, companies have developed software that defines the full business process in a computer language that a computer can directly execute. Process models can be run through execution engines that automate the processes directly from the model or, when a step is too complex to automate, Business Process Modeling Notation provides front-end capability for human input. Compared to either of the previous approaches, directly executing a process definition can be more straightforward and therefore easier to improve. However, automating a process definition requires flexible and comprehensive infrastructure, which typically rules out implementing these systems in a legacy IT environment.
Business rules
have been used by systems to provide definitions for governing behavior, and a business rule engine can be used to drive process execution and resolution.Monitoring
Monitoring encompasses the tracking of individual processes, so that information on their state can be easily seen, and statistics on the performance of one or more processes can be provided. An example of this tracking is being able to determine the state of a customer order '' so that problems in its operation can be identified and corrected.In addition, this information can be used to work with customers and suppliers to improve their connected processes. Examples are the generation of measures on how quickly a customer order is processed or how many orders were processed in the last month. These measures tend to fit into three categories: cycle time, defect rate and productivity.