Business Process Management: A Top-Down Approach to Improvement

All businesses cope with a growing level of competition. Over time, competitors create methods for producing products at lower cost with reduced cycle times. What's more, the marketplace for any given product has expanded over the last decade; competitors and end customers are now located across the globe. This hyper-competitive environment requires that companies become more efficient in all of their existing processes. If they fail to do so, they risk losing their edge.

Business process management (BPM) is a methodology that improves a company's effectiveness in delivering products to its end customers. Organizations use BPM to uncover ways to make their existing processes more efficient. In this article, I'll describe the steps involved throughout the methodology's life-cycle.

Exploring The Design

The Design stage of business process management is focused on identifying all inputs that influence a given process. This might include not only the raw materials used to produce a product, but also the people involved along the way. In certain industries, a process's design might include raw materials, key employees, service level agreements, procedures for escalating problems, and other factors that contribute to the production of a given product.

The goal of this stage is twofold. First, a design must be created for all processes within the organization. Second, theoretical designs are created that can potentially lead to process improvements. If the current design is inaccurate or it omits variables, the value of any improvements that are based upon the theoretical design will be questionable.

Modeling

Modeling involves using software to integrate the theoretical designs into existing business processes. Occasionally, it is done to study the effects of a single variable change. Most times, it is performed in order to analyze the influence of multiple variable changes on a single process. Depending upon the scope of the project, testers might execute a series of "what if" scenarios. For example, a tester might ask, "what would happen to the product's cycle time if only 70% of the contributing employees were available?"

Executing Variable Changes

At some point, variables that produced favorable results in the Modeling stage will be implemented in a production environment. There is an enormous level of complexity involved. A single change in one variable can cause a ripple effect throughout an entire process. While such effects can be identified by modeling, they are often difficult to replicate by relying solely upon human intervention. In most cases, software is used with human input, but even that approach can be problematic.

Tracking Results

Any variable changes must be monitored in order to determine their effect. Software is usually necessary because entire processes - along with each variable within them - must be tracked with an eye toward potential problems and defects. The level of tracking that each organization needs will be exclusive to their objectives and resources. Based on budget constraints and other resource limitations, many companies may choose to ignore certain data points. Other companies may wish to evaluate all variable-related information; process mining and similarly robust tools can help accomplish this.

Business process management is an ongoing methodology. Once theoretical designs have been created, modeling has been performed, and variable changes have been implemented, tracking is done with the goal of perpetual optimization. The objective is to produce an ongoing string of process improvements that help the organization deliver its products or services to its clients more effectively. Ideally, those improvements should make the company more efficient and thereby, help it maintain a competitive edge in its space.

While BPM is not as data-centric as related process efficiency methodologies (for example, Six Sigma), its effects can be just as dramatic.