What is business process management after all and how does it affect my company?
Components of business process management have been around for a long time in a variety of iterations. Those of you who are ‘longer in the tooth’ like me, will remember things like Clerical Work Improvement Programs, Process Re-engineering, Workouts, Continuous Improvement Programs, Six Sigma, Lean, Business Process Mapping, Business Process Modeling …and the list goes on. A number of these programs are still currently being used and will be for the foreseeable future. What they all have in common is that they are attempting to improve and manage all of, or part of a process, ie Business Process Management.
What I am trying to say is that BPM is not new, it has been around for decades. What is becoming different is the increasing complexity of businesses, their systems, their markets and their environments. Whereas before, businesses could probably survive on a high level understanding of how they operated, in today’s world it is more important than ever that business leaders and their employees have an appropriate level of understanding of their business processes, interactions and relationships with systems and, most of all, with customers. Gaining that understanding enables business leaders to employ any number of techniques (including some of those above) to improve, repair, remove or even design processes that support their key objectives.
Thankfully consultants and vendors are keeping pace with this rate of change so there is a myriad of solutions available to assist businesses to gain a greater understanding of how they operate.
Something to keep in mind that I have noticed over the years is the assumption that a business process improvement is tied in with a change or development in IT and subsequently increase in short term cost. This is definitely not the case. I have worked on a great number of solutions that involved purely a change in the way things were done by people and produced very successful outcomes. Another hangover from the early days of BPM is that process improvement always results in staff retrenchments. This is also not necessarily the case. Freeing staff from performing non-productive processes enables them to focus on the more profitable activities of the company.
True business process management is about understanding and managing business processes, data, IT systems, people, business objectives, risks, regulation and their relationships with each other.
Previously business process management in whatever guise was optional, now it is essential.
You should be able to look at every process in your company and ask one of two questions:
- How does this process contribute to my customer’s satisfaction?
- Or how does this process support those processes that contribute to my customer’s satisfaction?
If these cannot be answered then you would seriously have to question what the process is for. Why pay good money for something that is not supporting your key objective, the customer?