Business Design:

Business Process Management

Business Process Management  System (BPMS)

Meeting the Growing Demand for End-to-end Business Processes

By: Vadim Kotelnikov

"Firms will need process integration servers that model and carry out broad business processes."  ~ Forrester Research

Three Mandatory Requirements

The BPMS must meet three mandatory requirements:

  1. extreme flexibility

  2. reliability

  3. security

 

Benefits of a BPMS1

  1. Adaptability and Speed: The BPMS is your primary business velocity engine.

  2. Control and Manageability: The BPMS enables business process measurement.

The Starting Point: Twin Principles

Adapted from "Agenda", Michael Hammer3

To abandon the thinking and practices inherent in functional organizations, your commitment to process management must begin with focusing on two words – organized and together.

  1. Being organized means having concrete, specific designs for processes so that their performance isn't determined by improvisation or luck.

  2. Being together means creating an environment in which all process workers are aligned around common goals and see themselves as collaborators rather than adversaries.

Why BPMS?

By acquiring BPMS, your company may gain unprecedented control over the management of your business processes.

According to P.J. Jakovljevic, business process management (BPM) can cut product design time in half, reduce order time by 80 %, and drive call center productivity gains of 60%.

BPMS Defined

The BPMS is a new category of management software that opens a new era for IT-powered business infrastructure.  Business process management (BPM) technology coordinates the data and actions of disparate information technology (IT) systems and allows companies to transform customer interactions into revenue opportunities. It "enables companies to model, deploy and manage mission-critical business processes, that span multiple enterprise applications, corporate departments, and business partners – behinds the firewall and over the Internet."1

Guidelines on Implementing BPM

Integrated solutions that optimize only at a company- or department-level are no longer sufficient for success in today’s highly competitive virtual integration environment. Without an integrated and process-oriented solution, valuable departmental information is often lost to the company as a whole. What is needed is a real time solution that goes beyond integrating the content and processes of individual sales, marketing, or support department data.

For BPM to be successful, it must be event-driven, orchestrated, able to handle internal processes inside the firewall, exchange process information with external users, and support exception-based human interaction and human decision-making.4

Focusing On a Cultural Shift

BPMS deployment takes commitment, planning, a well thought-out implementation, users’ buy-in, discipline, and careful change management. The goal of BPMS should not only focus on solving processes through technology, but also focus on a cultural shifts within a company that encourages information sharing, because BPMS promotes the notion that a business moves forward based on the collective information that is stored, shared, and circulated among employees. It makes information available to all those who can use it, and enhances the investment that some businesses have already made through the implementation of e-business solutions, allowing for greater efficiencies throughout the entire value cycle of a business.4

References:

  1. "Business Process Management: The Third Wave", Howard Smith and Peter Fingar

  2. "Business Process Management (BPM) is a Team Sport: Play it to Win!," Andrew Spanyi

  3. "Agenda," Michael Hammer

  4. "Business Process Management: A Crash Course on What It Entails and Why to Use It," P.J. Jakovljevic, TechnologyEvolution.com,