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What is Business Process Management?
Every business is established in order to achieve a particular goal. As a part of achieving this collective goal, the business executes various processes. The method of managing these processes in order to achieve the organizational goal is called Business Process Management (BPM). The ultimate goal of BPM is to enhance the performance of a business by imposing various business methodologies and components.
For example, let us consider an online store. The organization contains various processes like establishing a virtual or a physical firm, acquiring stock, advertising the products, accepting the orders, dispatching the orders, delivering the orders and customer feedback. Without these basic processes, an online store cannot serve the purpose. With the help of BPM, every single one of these processes can be taken care so that the entire business process flow can be optimized i.e., the number of ingressing orders and the egressing products should be equal, confirmation of payment, delivering the orders on time or getting the customer feedback and working out accordingly. With the help of BPM, each of these steps can be monitored and can be optimized if required.
Importance of Business Process Management System:
As every single process of the business is fine tuned, the overall performance is obviously enhanced. However, BPM play a major role in the best performance of any organization, with respect to the following attributes.
- Higher productivity - BPM enables the production of an organization by pipelining various processes of a business, which results in efficient usage of resources, which in turn results in high productivity with limited resources.
- Reduced expenditure - As BPM enables optimizing every process of the business, redundancy can be eliminated easily, which results in reduced expenditure for the organization.
- Better control - BPM provides better control over every process of the business and also allows automation of processes.
- Higher agility - BPM enables the business processes to be implemented, modified or improved dynamically based upon the requirement.
- Higher visibility - With the help of BPM, companies can record the activities of every individual process of the business and hence, higher is the visibility of process performance.
- Improved customer service - The ability to take control over every step of the process improves the customer service provided by the organization.
Life Cycle of BPM:
As BPM involves in various activities across the business of the organization, the life cycle of BPM is conceptually categorized into five stages. However, these steps may vary based upon the business need.
Design
This activity involves in two smaller activities - Identification of existing processes within the business and the design of new processes. The goal of these two activities is to design an efficient flow of processes, based upon the existing processes.
Modelling
Modelling is the activity of understanding the business process from a different perspective. For example, how can a given task be accomplished when there is an abundance or scarcity of the resources. This helps in optimizing the production process.
Execution
Once the business process flow is modeled and optimized accordingly, it has to be executed. The execution activity involves in two method of executions - manual execution or automated execution. As the name itself explains, manual execution involves in humans whereas the automated execution involves in software, which is usually called Business Process Automation (BPA).
Monitoring
Monitoring is the activity of tracking the status of each process of the business flow. This is the point where an organization can look through every process and majorly optimize every process. In addition to this, the monitoring activity help in providing enhanced customer service as every parameter of execution can be identified. The process of monitoring and collecting data is called Process mining.
Optimization
In order to optimize the business process flow, the results from monitoring are used. Bottlenecks, opportunities for saving the resources, and other optimization activities are performed in this stage, which are usually identified with the help of process mining tools.
Reengineering
When there is no outcome of the business deviates from that of the stipulated the life cycle of the business has to be re-engineered. However, the process of reengineering is not an easy task to accomplish. Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is usually initiated and taken care by the President or CEO of the organization.
Business Process Management Tools and Technologies:
The Business Process Management tools are classified into two types - Business Process Analysis (BPA) tools and Business Process Management Suites (BPMS).
The BPA tools help in analyzing the processes of a given business. One the analysis is completed, the results are used for achieving the preset goals. Following are the features of a BPA tool.
- Capability of business model drawing and development.
- Business model analysis and reporting.
- Module integration and process automation.
- Efficient performance.
- Scalability of business.
The BPMS is very useful designing and implementation of a given business model. A BPMS helps an organization to monitor the business process flow continuously. The major advantage of BPMS is that it allows process optimization during the runtime of the process. Following are the features of BPMS.
- Process modelling.
- Configuration functionalities.
- Building custom reports.
- Monitor and analyze process outcomes.
- Real-time analytics
What to consider when choosing BPM solution?
The primary consideration for choosing a BPM solution is the goal of the BPM. Choosing a BPM solution should be done with the goal above all other specifications. However, there are other factors that are to be considered when choosing a BPM solution and here are they listed.
Budget
Budget is the deciding factor of consideration. With higher budget comes the higher number of functionalities. But, it has to be decided if all of those functionalities are desired.
Deployment
BPM solutions can be deployed via either on-Cloud or on-Premise deployment methodologies. The use of on-Premise approach has been diminishing as the industry is completely migrating to on-Cloud deployment. For the latest trends of industry, on-Cloud deployment is high recommended.
Implementation time cost
A BPM solution should be easy to be implemented so that the business can be put into its place at the earliest possible. As far as the modern industry is concerned, automated implementation is preferred over manual implementation as it is very effective and efficient method of implementation.
Product features and support
The features that a product should support also decides the best BPM solution that can serve the purpose. Alongside features, support plays major role. Once the BPM solution is implemented, support is need at the time of failure.
Vendor location and reliability
As implementation of a BPM system is a costly affair with respect to the BPM service provider, the vendor location is a key factor that decides which BPM solution to be opted. As every business does, vendor reliability is another key factor.
Implementation model
The hierarchy of implementation of a BPM system by a given BPM service provider also plays a role in choosing the solution. It is to be decided before opting for any BPM solution.
Issues in Implementing Business Process Management
Though BPM is a package of enough number of advantages, there are disadvantages; strictly speaking, challenges faced by BPM. Following are the challenges faced by BPM, which are yet to be addressed.
Moving beyond tech deployments
It is to be understood that BPM is not just a technology that blooms for a period of time. BPM is an end-to-end business process that enhances the business process flow.
BPM is more of on-Cloud service
Though BPM is available as on-Cloud and on-Premise service, on-Cloud service is prefered over the other, as the industry is moving towards cloud. But for midrange organizations, cloud becomes an extra financial burden.
Integration complexities
Though implementation of BPM services is easy, modules for near future are expected to face integration complexities. Hence they should be chosen carefully.
Prioritizing human-centric process visualization
The visualizations generated by BPM systems are too complex to be understood by humans. Hence, the visualizations from the BPM systems should be in a human-centric approach.
Where to look for Business Process Management service?
Codigion. Yes! Codigion is the place where you can seamlessly look for a Business Process Management service. As a BPM service provider, Codigion is happy to disclose that all the BPM related activities within the organization are managed and maintained by Codigion. This is just a token of our expertise in providing BPM services. We offer various BPM services:
- Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) integration service to define and deploy governance, strategies and models.
- Codigion provides the feature of carrying the legacy apps and historic data forward across the implementation.
- The services Codigion provides are including policy-based controls and processes.
- Codigion provides Cloud integration for the BPM serves with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
- Codigion provides a real-time process management solution.
As a BPM service provider, Codigion is one of the top rated BPM service providers in India, with customers spanning across the globe.