What is Business Process Management?
Business Process Modelling is becoming a higher priority for business managers and analysts as there is an
increasing emphasis in organizations to document, understand and improve their business processes.
Managers and business owners are realizing that operating their businesses without well documented processes
is just like a pilot who is flying blind without properly functioning instruments and navigation. Well documented
and streamlined processes are essential in a smooth functioning of a team as they help ensure consistency,
trackability and focus towards a shared goal.
Business Process Modelling is a combination of various process related steps such as Process Mapping,
Process Discovery, Process Simulation, Process Analysis and Process Improvement.
At a very broad, level documenting a company’s business process offers the following benefits:
•Aligning business operations with strategy
•Improve quality, compliance and safety
•Reduce time and cost
•Create flexibility in workforce
•Reduce training load and cost
•Reduce impact of high staff turnover
•Institute continuous improvement
•Improve motivation
•Reduce risk
•Improve productivity
•Improve competitiveness
•Prepare for outsourcing/market testing
•Improve customer satisfaction
•Evaluate improvement options
How Business Process Management Delivers These Benefits in Your Business?
A. Aligns Operations with Business Strategy
Implementing a business strategy or a new business model requires changes in the operations and in how
people perform their work. This can be affected only by operationalizing the business changes to the actual
business processes, business rules and decisions that are made on a day to day basis by all the people in the
organization. Business Process Modelling facilitates this by helping:
Link organizational strategy to well-defined business processes - Business process modelling
is a critical tool for management and executives to ensure that the business processes are
consistent with and enable execution towards achieving the overall strategy of the organization.
Align business execution and operation activity with strategy -Process modelling ensures that
the operational tasks and activities performed by the team members actually help the
organization implement its strategy. If the processes and the strategy are not aligned it usually
leads to failure in execution because even if the operational tasks are performed correctly, the
overall organizational goals are not achieved.
Implement Business Process Reengineering (BPR) by understanding the existing processes
and changing them for improved performance - Business process analysis helps in identifying
bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the processes and thus improving them.
Enable Process Agility, an ability to change and communicate processes quickly to take
advantage of new business opportunities or address business challenges.
B. Improves Process Communication
One area that distinguishes successful businesses and teams is that they have a very clear idea of what they are
supposed to do, how they are supposed to do it and what is the exact role of every team member. Clear
communication of the operational processes is critical to facilitate a smooth functioning of a team. Business
Process Modelling enables the documenting and communicating of the organizations business processes:
Process modelling offers a common unified language and methodology for communicating
processes and information about processes and decision rules.
It is ideal for training of new people and rapid knowledge transfer because with a thoroughly
documented process any new team member can be very quickly trained on what they have to
do in any situation that they may face.
Minimizes potential danger of loss of staff resulting in loss of business process knowledge.
It helps business managers communicate their ideas quickly and clearly.
Jump-starts the organizational process documentation initiative.
Turns the team's experience and "tribal knowledge" into documented processes.
C. Increases Control and Consistency
Organizations and companies that succeed are ones that ensure their business processes and rules are well
designed and that they are consistently applied the same way every single time. This process control and
consistency is key for success in organizations with desire for world class quality performance.
Business Process Modelling makes this possible by helping:
Formalize existing processes which may not be well documented or which have evolved over
time into "informal knowledge".
Execute process in a consistent manner because instead of relying on people to remember to
do the right thing the documented process can be given to the business users.
Make better decisions because guesswork is eliminated as business users can have the
documented business rules in front of them.
Handle exceptions faster and in a better way.
Complete regulatory compliance by ensuring that the documented processes follow the
company guidelines and legal regulations.
Put business people in charge.
D. Improves Operational Efficiencies
In today's business environment, every business and every manager wants to ensure that they are achieving the
best possible results with the resources available to them. There is no room for inefficiencies and wastage.
The Process simulation and analysis steps of Business Process Modelling are critical tools for managers and
analysts to ensure that their processes are optimized and are running like a well-oiled machine:
Process Simulation allows analysis and understanding of the process flows and helps
managers know if there is room for further optimization and efficiencies.
It helps spot needed improvements and reduce process cycle time.
It increases productivity of existing resources and staff and so allows the team to do more with
less.
It facilitates risk free experimentation and encourages exchange of process
improvement ideas.
Process simulation allows modelling of process designs before actually implementing them
thus minimizing disruptions.
It encourages a mind-set of continually optimizing business critical processes to incrementally
improve operational efficiencies.
Process analysis enables better resource utilization.
E. Gain Competitive Advantage
All the benefits mentioned above lead to a significant competitive advantage
for an organization that has invested the time and effort to document, simulate and improve its business
processes. Studies of many wildly successful companies have often shown that their success was not due to
better ideas or better business models but because they invested significantly in business process modelling to
constantly refine and improve their processes.
A slight improvement in one activity here and another one there leads to an overall better process and as that
process is executed repeatedly in the day-to-day running of the business it makes an organization much more
efficient and better than its competitors.
Business Process Management and Automation
