Business Process Management

Quick summary: Did you know that many companies lose 20-30% of revenue every year due to inefficient business processes? That’s where Business Process Management (BPM) can be your savior. Learn how BPM has evolved over the years and its crucial role in streamlining processes. From designing optimal processes to monitoring performance, this blog explores the untapped insights to process optimization. Read on to revolutionize your business process!

Business Process Management or BPM – the name says it all. But to make one futile attempt, we would say it’s the discipline of managing disparate business processes across the enterprise. It’s tough to juggle the different processes, take a holistic look at them, and streamline them.

Why BPM? It’s simple – for boosting the efficiency, productivity, adaptability, and agility of the enterprise process. With good BPM in place, enterprises can have the luxury of modifying certain business processes without really changing the fundamental business rules. This way, they can better react to market changes and grab greater opportunities.

A good BPM also adds to the enterprise’s bottom line and plays a role in market differentiation. But most of all, business process management software makes sure that your enterprise machinery is kept well-oiled with minimum possibilities of process breakdown or bottleneck.

Business Process Management Solutions – Over the Years

Like everything else, even BPM systems have evolved with time. As compared to its toddler days, BPM systems today is a far more complex and challenging concept. During the early 90s, BPM systems resembled workflow management applications.

Their primary focus was manually operated processes that were document based on nature. The idea of automated processes was still new then for BPM. But BPM has come a long way from those initial days, and what we have today as BPM systems are far more complex.

The present-day business process management software focuses on two important components that control processes in an enterprise – people and systems. Today, organizations have person-to-person workflows, system-to-system workflows, person-to-system workflows, and system-to-person workflows. The concept of business process automation to optimize the workflow is taking a rise.

The modern-day BPM spans across all these workflows. It includes process modeling, process execution, and process monitoring within its ambit. And then, there is process integration and process customization as well. So now what we have is an extensive span for business process management.

Major Components of a BPM Suite

Now when we say business processes, we mainly categorize them as front office processes and back-office processes. Consequently, business process management solutions also fall within the same categories. Thus, we have Front Office BPM (FO-BPM) solutions and Back Office BPM (BO-BPM) solutions.

The FO-BPM solutions are the more human-centric ones focusing on person-to-person processes. Characteristically, these processes involve the documentation of some sort like the exchange of reports via email attachment, etc.

The FO-BPM solutions are more suitable for short-lived transactions instead of the longer running processes. Being front office in nature, these solutions improve the consistency of services delivered and help personalize services.

An enterprise can use FO-BPM to design forms, define data fields, customize process templates, set up access control lists, configure integration capabilities, and manage deadlines.

A complete contrast to FO-BPM, the BO-BPM focuses on system-to-system processes or the automated processes. These processes are typically long running in nature and depend on several other external processes to complete their work cycle.

This is also where aggregation of enterprise-wide systems takes place. As opposed to FO-BPM, the BO-BPM solutions are not concerned with human-centric process workflows. They are more popularly used for back-end process composition, data or message transformation, and automating service interfaces.

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Process Designing and Modeling

Process designing and modeling is the very first phase of a BPM strategy. Your business processes need to be mapped through all the different stages and then designed into the BPM solution. There are several visual design tools available with BPM solutions. But the first thing we need to establish is what would fit the bill of a “business process.”

Once we have this in place, the next step is to establish the process flow. A process is generally made up of different steps and several independent tasks. We have to connect these tasks in a logical sequence and draw out a process flow. Do make sure that we account for things like documents, images, reports, etc attached to these tasks.

It’s also important that we define the start point and the endpoint for a process very clearly. Once we have all these things in place, we can use BPM solutions’ visual tools and map the process.

Process Execution

Once we have designed the process, what we have on hand is a process flow model. We can execute this model in a BPM engine. But since we had designed the model in a visual tool, we will have to change its format to execute it in the BPM engine. For this, we can export the process model in a language format supported by the BPM engine.

Secondly, while executing the model, we can change different variables to test efficiency. Thus, we can perform scenario tests on our process workflow. Process execution also needs a very typical runtime environment with a low-security level, transaction volume, and concurrency management efforts.

Now when it comes to controlling process execution, we have two well-established approache bpm systemss, namely Orchestration and Choreography. Under the Orchestration approach, a single entity owns the process and controls all the exchanges and activities.

In contrast to this, all the process participants jointly own the process in the Choreography approach. They have a contract mutually agreed upon to govern all the exchanges and activities.

Process Monitoring

After execution comes process monitoring. We must monitor a process to identify any weak links. How to do this? Here again, we have two methods – real-time and historical.

Real-time method is best suited to metrics that fall in the “in progress” category. A process that needs to keep going in a continuous loop can be best monitored using real-time methods. This method allows us to record failures and exceptions to the process while it keeps running.

For processes that require one-time execution, the historical method is best suited. We can generate reports and conclude from the method’s historical results. We can even compare our key performance indicators and service level agreements with data generated by historical monitoring.

Thus, depending on the type of process, we can pick and choose the monitoring method.

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Final SayingsAs we all know, businesses can no longer afford inefficiencies to navigate through today’s dynamic digital age. That’s where leveraging business process automation solutions is one of the strategic imperatives to achieve efficiency and agility in business process management. By automating repetitive tasks, reducing errors, and optimizing workflows, it can help increase productivity and customer experience (CX) – the ultimate goal of every business.Furthermore, BPM empowers businesses to adapt swiftly to evolving market dynamics and gain a competitive edge. Ultimately, the benefit of BPM is undeniable. So, are you ready to future-proof your business with 2x efficiency? Our experts are here to guide you every step of the way. Feel free to schedule a consultation and discover how BPM can keep your firm forward.