Business Frameworks And Models

BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Business process management (BPM) is a systematic and business solution approach to make an organization’s workflow, more efficient and more capable of adapting to an ever-changing environment. It allows all the processes to run smoothly and effectively. It is a way that leads to the “process optimization”. BPM views a business as a set of processes or workflows or we can also say that it is a set of activities that are to be performed for the overall development of the firm. BPM Software is software which enables businesses to model, implement, execute, monitor and optimize their processes.

The goal of BPM is to reduce human error and miscommunication and focus stakeholders on the requirements of their roles. BPM is a subset of infrastructure management, an administrative area concerned with maintaining and optimizing an organization’s equipment and core operations. For running this infrastructure we require some BPM tools that are as follows:

1. Planning and budgeting
2. Key performance indicators (KPIs)
3. Balanced scorecard (BSC)
4. Benchmarking
5. Business excellence model
6. Enterprise risk management (ERM)
7. Six sigma
8. Performance dashboards
9. Customer relationship management (CRM)
10. Performance appraisals

These are the tools or sub-system components residing within BPM, that plays a major role in the organization development.

BPM SOLUTIONS

Horizontal BPM Solutions:

These are those BPM solutions that can be applied across several industries. Horizontal frameworks deal with design and development of business processes and are generally focused on technology and reuse.

Vertical BPM Solutions:

BPM solutions that are specific to a particular industry or type of process. Vertical BPM frameworks focus on a specific set of coordinated tasks and have pre-built templates that can be readily configured and deployed.

BPM Life Cycle

The BPM life cycle follows a chain of steps that are as follows:

Design

Process design encompasses both the identification of existing processes and the design of the 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. What processes should be present or what process are not required are to be done under this stage.

Modeling

Modeling takes the theoretical design and introduces combinations of observations that are needed for the further steps. It determines how the process might operate under different circumstances.

For example-“What if I have 70% of resources to do the same task?” “What if I want to do the same job for 80% of the current cost?”..

Execution

It takes care of, how 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. 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 (e.g. order arrived, awaiting delivery, invoice paid) 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. Here Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) extends and expands the monitoring tools generally provided by BPMS.

Optimization

Process optimization includes retrieving the best of the process performance. It is the most important phase of the life cycle of the BPM as the main goal of the BPM is to get optimized processes.

Reengineering

When the process becomes too noisy and optimization is not fetching the desired output, it is recommended to re-engineer the entire process cycle. Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has been used by organizations to attempt to achieve efficiency and productivity at work.