Process Excellence >> Business Results

What's BPM

Business processes have been around since the beginning of business. Business Process Management Systems are the next step in making them explicit, executable and adaptable.

Source : CSC Research

Whether developing or manufacturing a product, hiring and supervising employees or supporting customers, processes are the unifying thread, which enable companies to create value for customers.

Business Process Management system provides an organization with the ability to collectively define their business processes, deploy these processes as applications accessible via the web, and then provide employees and managers with the capacity to execute, control and improve those processes. To be a comprehensive business process management system a solution must not only automate processes, it must also:
  • Integrate with existing systems such as ERP and databases
  • Support business rules and people roles inside an organization
  • Give employees fast and contextual access to automated processes
  • Help management to easily improve those processes
BPM systems are ideal for process-intensive vertical industries such as financial services, insurance, healthcare and government. BPM systems also useful in more horizontal applications like human resources, manufacturing and production. Business process management systems work well in several scenarios: operations with processes that require manual intervention at specific points in applications (should this mortgage or insurance claim be approved?); straightforward processing situations with no manual intervention (having accounts payable data set off the printing of checks); and routine business function operations (sending out notification to various departments when a new person is hired and needs a computer, insurance forms, tax forms and the like).

If you decide that a business process management solution is right for your organization, you face two major challenges. The first is modeling your business applications and systems. Many businesses don't know their business systems well enough to do this without extensive research. Others know their systems but don't know if their systems are extensible - able to be integrated with other systems for the exchange of data.

The second challenge is finding a business process management system that fits your specific business needs. A good BPM solution provides a framework that can cross organizational divisions and boundaries to link disparate business applications, both inside and outside the company. Its purpose is to allow for inter-application communication through Web-based services.) Since BPM tends to focus on mission-critical aspects of an operation, it's important to find software or services that provide features and functionality pertinent to your company and supported by a BPM vendor committed to helping you succeed.

As a software tool, BPM takes the form of an integrated suite of components that first model the end-to-end process from a business perspective and then create an automated implementation of the flow described by the model. Once the automated process is deployed, BPM components monitor business performance based on actual process data. Instead of treating business modeling, IT implementation and performance management as independent endeavors, BPM unites them with an integrated set of tools and an overarching management philosophy of continual incremental improvement.

67% of BPM initiatives, has been implemented in less than 6 months and out of 55% had a ROI of $100 000 to $500 000
Source : Gartner Group
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