Improving customer service, bringing new products to market, cutting out cost inefficiencies, and complying with new regulations, all push business processes and their effective management to the top of the priority list. Increasingly organisations are realising that their business processes are a fundamental source of competitive advantage.
One aspect of the response to these pressures has been a change in the way that companies are looking to approach process management. Increasingly, companies are looking for a different way of improving business processes, avoiding investment in the large, expensive and risky new application projects that have so often led to disappointment in the past.
Analysts have labelled this new approach business process management (BPM). According to the Aberdeen Group, BPM is about the reality that business processes are complex, dynamic and intertwined throughout an organisation - and, beyond the firewall - to its partners and customers. To effectively automate and manage cross-functional processes requires a new approach and supporting tools that reflect this reality - BPM is that approach. BPM allows processes to be modelled and then dynamically maintained as business requirements are refined or modified, in the light of new information on how users work or changing business needs.
BPM is a change management and system implementation methodology to aid the continuous comprehension and management of business processes that interact with people and systems, both within and across organisations.
It is a methodology based on the following assumptions:
* Business processes are ever-changing and developing.
* Processes cross-cut each other.
* Processes must flow between multiple organisations and interested parties.
How is BPM technology different from other technology?
BPM`s primary roots are in the process management capabilities of workflow tools but it also includes capabilities that derive from process modelling, application integration, process monitoring and rapid application development tools. However, BPM is not just a sum of these parts. It brings together all these technology elements into a single platform that manages the lifecycle of a process from definition, through deployment, execution, measurement, change and re-deployment.
The heart of a BPM platform is the process engine that executes the business process as you have defined it.
Mark Ehmke, MD, Staffware South Africa
In essence, BPM promotes a `process-centric` view of IT where the management of end-to-end processes is separated from the underlying applications, their connections and data. It involves the creation of an `independent process layer`. This layer contains a complete view of all the activities necessary to execute a particular business process and it can manage the flow of these activities whether they involve different applications, people, or a combination of both. It is an essential aspect of BPM that this independent process layer complements existing (and future) investments in applications, content repositories and data integration tools.
Why is this independent process layer important?
This process-centric approach overcomes two key obstacles that have historically impeded IT`s ability to respond to the business. Firstly, packaged applications represent a `hard-wired` set of process elements, which while sometimes configurable, are generally difficult to change. Secondly, a complete process for say fulfilling a customer`s order is rarely captured within a single application. Typically many applications (and groups of people) are involved.
By separating the management of processes out into an independent process layer, BPM provides a number of advantages in this respect. It allows an organisation to quickly improve the degree to which processes are automated by linking existing systems together, and filling the gaps between systems that have previously been difficult to automate and manage.
It also enables a more disciplined approach to process management; processes can be clearly defined, they can be actively controlled and executed by the BPM layer, and they can be measured at every step.
Perhaps most importantly, processes can be easily changed, and those changes made operational far more quickly and cheaply. So BPM is not just about automating existing processes better, it provides an effective environment for continuously improving the processes themselves.
Components of BPM
To function effectively across the enterprise and all its key processes, the independent process layer is able to:
* Handle a wide range of different processes.
* Manage very complex processes.
* Scale to thousands of different processes and millions of different process instances.
* Enable the rapid creation and deployment of new processes.
* Allow a non-technical business user to rapidly define and deploy a process change.
* Allow true 24x7 operation.
As well as having these characteristics, a BPM platform has various functional elements to provide a comprehensive independent process layer, as explained below.
The heart of a BPM platform is the process engine that executes the business process as you have defined it. This engine tracks the state of the process at any given time and ensures that the correct sequences of process steps are followed as defined by the business. A non-technical business user is able to define business processes in terms of graphical models of the process that are then executed by the process engine.
Measurement of the processes as they execute, provides the information necessary to understand how each element of a business process is performing, and how it could be improved. Technical or systems level monitoring and management of platform is also provided.
The BPM platform is able to communicate with the underlying applications and people who will perform the tasks necessary at each step of the process. This integration layer ensures that a wide range of different applications and EAI technologies can be integrated quickly and easily with the BPM platform.
People play a vital role in most business processes. The BPM platform provides a rich environment for the user to play their part in the process and efficiently complete the work items necessary to progress the process.
A BPM platform as described in the five layers above adds value to the management of any process that is fragmented across multiple different systems and groups of people. Process frameworks provide specific `template` processes that can be used as a start point to model an organisation`s specific process needs.
Share