Business process management is not a new term. What exactly does it mean? Process management transcends mapping activities as it is being done in the corporate operational routine. It means you can break it down and translate it into running a business by a process.

First, what are processes? Processes are activities carried out by a particular department within an organization. But did you know that processes mean more? Processes are not restricted to the walls of the department of a company. Instead, they permeate through many departments, in an end-to-end link. Considering this, processes encompass mainstreaming diverse ideas and various positions of the managers of an organizational structure.

Business process management can mean different automation efforts, XML business process languages, packaged ERP systems, and workflow systems. The catch is to capture the responsibility of the management in being able to concentrate on the workflow engines to control the flow of the process, measure processes automatically, and educate managers accordingly.

The larger the cross-cutting, the more the likelihood of being an end-to-end case, and thus, processes have some direct or indirect impact on the concerned organization- actual or potential, frequent or seasonal, whichever the case.

Companies structure their processes via interviews with the departmental heads who highlight the activities within their jurisdiction and their subordinates. Having drawn all streams, they can then unify the flow of each department. We can not talk about processes unless the flow is unified. Otherwise, the flows designed would be some mere departmental activities.

A business process is a series of endeavors, steps or tasks carried out by a group of stakeholders to achieve a solid goal. You can repeat the steps, and sometimes by many users in an optimized manner. Ideally, a business process can be manual or automated. For the manual approach, you can achieve the process with no form of technical help. If automated, it means there is a technology aid in place to assist users in implementing the process more accurately, and optimally.

TYPES OF BUSINESS PROCESSES

Business processes cut across industries- vertical and horizontal and can include any business operation. Types of business processes are:

  • Manufacturing; where you conduct a product assembly process, a quality assurance process or some corrective maintenance process
  • Finance; including invoicing process and billing processor risk management process
  • Banking; credit check and customer on-boarding
  • Travel; agent billing and trip booking.
  • HR; leavers or starters process, vacation request, among others
  • Compliance; legal check, or safety audit

Others are health, defense, and the public sector.

One business function that enjoys BPM is HR. This is evident in how about 50% of the work involved in the department is formed for managing documents. Their processes range from signing vacation forms, getting applicants to fill documents, and all sorts. Truthfully, this can be grueling work and very time-consuming. It is therefore required that you introduce an effective means of living off the stress via effective business process management. Or would you rather see your HR department spending so much time on making sure they sign the document? Wouldn’t you rather use a BPM software that automates the entire document management? It is clear that regardless of what you offer or where you belong in the marketplace, you are not exempted from business process management.

PROCESS MANAGEMENT: WHOSE RESPONSIBILITY?

What do we do with the organization’s processes? It is necessary to define who caters to these processes. And these are the “process owners”. The manager is the one in charge of process improvement and is accountable for ensuring that the processes are effective as much as the values required to protect such processes. At The Swiss Quality, we provide a stellar business process management service delivered through a team of concerned and proactive business operations management whose responsibility entails seeing to and managing how the work within given organizations will be done. This is the primary concern, and the people to deploy to work are not really of much concern. With a project mapping process, we strive to topple the organization management and allow it to be some process-oriented structure. Nowadays, it is common to find companies map their processes out and not being sure of what exactly to do with them. We do what we have to do, to avoid such distress and incompetence. Because in the long run, such companies fall into a management category that still functions with their background processes.

It is also obvious that changing the management of a company from vertical to functional horizontal is neither a simple nor quick task. More than toppling, the process owners, otherwise called the managers, have to define their key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor the processes’ performance.

BASICS OF BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

It is discovered that about 40% of the information required to monitor the KPIs are not in the company. Having it would make sense in enabling an organization to develop certain new controls, have personalized systems and in fact, create new processes.

Further, business process management entails adopting work procedures based on the activities represented in the company’s processes. This is by putting a level of standard on the “how-to” help people absorb new complex tasks more effectively and within a short time. To achieve viable and active management with horizontal processes, it is essential to assign tasks to process owners and create committee processes simultaneously.

An active process development team carries out the following when mapping activities to execute process management for different businesses.

  • Identify and resolve inherent inter-process integration problems and conflicts between processes and functional leaders. More so, see to resource allocation and alignment of process against strategy.
  • Oversee the firm’s processes portfolio and consequently align, prioritize and encourage the right action plans to transform
  • Prioritize and allocate resources required to achieve the process’s objectives
  • Track and report metrics of process performance of the managers (process owners)
  • Conduct and maintain the business work procedures and manuals that suit the different organizations
  • Incorporate the change of culture in the organization into the entire company’s activities. Business process management (BPM) tools are also key instruments needed to create the right reality for your business.

Process management is a consulting service offered by The Swiss Quality to improve aligning your organization’s processes with your strategic goals. Likewise, we design and implement process architectures, establish process measurement systems that befit your organizational goals, and importantly, organize managers to manage processes better. We know that you can easily automate process management with business process management (BPM) software but it is equally important to note that people use some BPM software within the business process management discipline to accomplish some certain aspects. A complete BPM system is another tool used by BPM professionals.

It is pertinent to take process management as an organizational discipline that provides tools and resources for analyzing, defining, optimizing, monitoring and controlling the processes entailed in business to measure and drive improved performance of these processes. Being a broad discipline, it means concerned or interested businesses must apply many of the tenets of managing the processes to specific areas of an individual business.

Business Process Management

PROCESS MANAGEMENT VS CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Since process improvement often demands that you put new behaviors and technologies in place, change management relates to and is a critical part of the individual process management projects and framework. The interpretation of this is that a great process executed poorly can likely fail but with the right training, coaching, and continuous involvement with the process design, the new process is simply adopted upon implementation.

CHALLENGES OF BUSINESS PROCESSES

As earlier said, executing business processes and managing them is difficult. You are likely to encounter challenges like

  • Bottlenecks: Bottleneck is the slowing or halting of a process at a certain stage owing to a human/machine error or difficulty
  • Integration problems: That is when the process technology does not integrate well with the existing systems. It would consequently lead to malfunctions and gaps in communication
  • Lack of visibility: When the management does not have a way to view the stance of the processes, their status and how they are performing in general
  • Work duplication and redundancy: When there are inefficient processes within areas that are unnecessarily being repeated

SOLUTIONS

To manage and solve business process challenges, an effective business process management suite or software can take the aforementioned parameters as input and provide the right tools to handle and ease them. These tools are:

  • Management Dashboards to address bottlenecks and visibility problems
  • Collaboration Tools used by developers to share, work together and view other people’s work to cut down on redundancy and work duplication
  • Integration Wizards to help integrate the BPMS with the common or existing ERP/CRM systems
  • Verification and Error Handling to cater to every dimension and spice of malfunctions and help solve errors.

Our BPM suite at The Swiss Quality contains these tools to leverage your surviving and in fact, thriving opportunities with business process management. We have a unique technology used to further help improve the stakeholder’s ability to stay continually efficient.

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