Business process management (BPM)
Business process management (BPM) is a field in operations management that focuses on improving corporate performance by managing and optimizing a company's business processes. It can therefore be described as a "process optimization process." It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach. These processes can impact the cost and revenue generation of an organization. As a managerial approach, BPM sees processes as strategic assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and improved to deliver value-added products and services to clients. This approach closely resembles other Total Quality Management or Continuous Improvement Process methodologies and BPM proponents also claim that this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology. As such, many BPM articles and pundits frequently discuss BPM from one of two viewpoints: people and/or technology. Changes in Business Process Management 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 as of 2010, with formal definitions and technical modeling, has been around since the early 1990s (see business process modeling). 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[by whom?] 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. |
BPM life-cycle
There are four critical components of a BPM Suite:
Cloud computing BPM Cloud computing business process management is the use of (BPM) tools that are delivered as software services (SaaS) over a network. Cloud BPM business logic is deployed on an application server and the business data resides in cloud storage. Market According to Gartner, by 2016, 20% of all the "shadow business processes" will be supported by BPM cloud platforms. Gartner refers to all the hidden organizational processes that are supported by IT departments as part of legacy business processes such as Excel spreadsheets, routing of emails using rules, phone calls routing, etc. These can, of course also be replaced by other technologies such as workflow software. Benefits The benefits of using cloud BPM services include removing the need and cost of maintaining specialized technical skill sets in-house and reducing distractions from an enterprise's main focus. It offers controlled IT budgeting and enables geographical mobility. The details of this are still emerging. See also Application service provider Business process modeling Business activity MonitoringBusiness intelligence Business-oriented architecture Business process automationBusiness process reengineering Comparison of business integration software Enterprise planning systems Enterprise software ITIL Managed services Workflow |
As of 2010 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:
As of 2012 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.[11] The compliance aspect in BPM is highly important for governmental organizations. As of 2010 BPM approaches in a governmental context largely focus on operational processes and knowledge representation.[12] Although there have been many technical studies on operational business processes in both the public and private sectors, researchers have rarely taken legal compliance activities into account, for instance the legal implementation processes in public-administration bodies.
- 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
As of 2012 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.[11] The compliance aspect in BPM is highly important for governmental organizations. As of 2010 BPM approaches in a governmental context largely focus on operational processes and knowledge representation.[12] Although there have been many technical studies on operational business processes in both the public and private sectors, researchers have rarely taken legal compliance activities into account, for instance the legal implementation processes in public-administration bodies.