BPM a key business driver

Organisations are not spending enough time analysing their business and defining key processes step by step, resulting in the failure to align business needs and requirements, says Erik du Toit, accounts manager at Datacentrix.

Du Toit believes business process management (BPM) has become one of the most important enterprise requirements in all market segments. From a daily operational perspective, he says, BPM allows the organisation to align all aspects of the business with its specific wants and needs.

“BPM allows for a holistic management approach that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology”, says Du Toit.

He argues that BPM, by default, improves the processes in the organisation and allows the business to monitor, analyse, control and improve processes more efficiently and effectively. “In short, BPM is a key business driver,” Du Toit notes.

With the ever-changing business environment, Du Toit says organisations need to adopt strategies for flexibility that accommodate constant change. He singles out globalisation as one of the most interesting economic developments that must be taken into account by any organisation when implementing BPM.

“Constant change presents a number of challenges to organisations, with specific focus on the enterprise's core business processes. Static core processes are not enough to keep pace with the ever-changing dynamics of business today. The focus needs to be on process flexibility that allows for change”, he says.

In regards to governance, Du Toit labels it “a must-have” that ensures smooth delivery of BPM.

“Business needs to link business rules to business processes and business users, to create a direct correlation between company policy and business activities,” he says. “This will increase the level of governance within organisations.”

Du Toit adds that governance is essential in ensuring process integrity, enabling users to be aware of how to manage decisions according to their goals and policies.

The focus needs to be on managing business changes separately, to allow all processes to be automatically updated simply by making the change in one central location, notes Du Toit.

“A successful BPM project begins with well-defined requirements,” says Du Toit, adding there is a myth that software tools alone will address BPM strategies in organisations.

“This is not true. Organisations need to understand and have well-documented processes with a good understanding of their processes prior to investigating technology that fits,” he argues.

Defining business requirements, minus technology or tools, says Du Toit, can also come in handy as a cost-effective strategy.

“Defining your business requirements clearly and accurately speeds up the software development processes and leads to dramatic savings for organisations. Software development projects suffer most when changes in requirements come into play. This constitutes delays, revisions, and rework, which contributes to additional cost.”

Du Toit says when modelling their business applications and systems, organisations should have a close look at their systems and the extensibility of these systems to address BPM integration components.

Secondly, he advises companies to find the correct software tools to fit their environments. This decision would be based on how the tools or process enablers fit across the company's framework, and whether they will link disparate business systems in an effective way. “Find the tool that will provide the functionalities and features required within your organisation.”

According to Du Toit, companies should invest in BPM to analyse and document their business processes end-to-end. From a software perspective, he says, the BPM tool will allow for an integrated suite of components across the enterprise that will allow the business to automate processes throughout.

“Investment in BPM will allow organisations to reduce turnaround time on requests, increase throughput, user efficiency and performance,” he says. “This will also contribute to decreased paper printing consumables, meeting legislative requirements, compliance, and will allow for process tracking as well as status reporting at any time.”

He adds that BPM will allow for audit trails of activities performed by users and systems and will monitor bottlenecks in each process, to help assist in enhancing these processes.

Du Toit is one of the keynote speakers at the ITWeb BPM Summit, scheduled for 14 and 15 September at Vodaworld, Midrand.