BPM: Process orchestration to get business back on-song

In 2005 most organisations will again focus on the most strategic and critical projects that can change and improve their organisations, but are we really leveraging last year`s efforts and improvements?

To achieve sustainable business improvement, organisations need to orchestrate their people, process and technology resources to ensure they weave them into a continuous improvement drive to move from ineffective to streamlined processes.

Only once a continuous productivity improvement cycle is accomplished will the organisation be able to repeatedly leverage its process capital to achieve and sustain competitive advantage. Business process management (BPM) is the main facilitator and driver to ensure organisations can orchestrate their variety of efforts in the most optimum way.

As with many international organisations, South African companies have to co-ordinate their initiatives to ensure a solid foundation is set for BPM.

To achieve a process-centric focus across the enterprise which enables the full process improvement lifecycle benefits, isolated component selection and architecture can no longer be tolerated.

Process and technology architecture needs to be carefully considered to ensure end-to-end process and regulatory compliance demands can be met in a standard fashion across the enterprise. The emphasis is to ensure systems and people can access information across the enterprise.

Business modelling is essential, not only to understand existing processes and simulate process improvements, but to provide business with a mechanism to analyse, plan and swiftly provide new offerings required in a rapidly changing environment.

Continuous measurement is required to drive an endless cycle of productivity improvements. BPM allows for the prioritisation, redesign, simulation and optimisation of each process while interrelated processes can be monitored.

Simulation modelling has been neglected in the past due to high cost and problematic transfer of the optimised solution to the execution system. BPM offers process designers the ability to identify the most optimum scenario based on measured performance. Once the optimised solution has been identified, the solution can be transferred to the execution engine to be activated - leaving minimal chance for "surprises".

BPM suites provide workflow to ensure routing and escalation between people and systems can be accommodated. The approach is more process-centric as opposed to the traditional application-centric case instance.

BPM encourages process and system transformation to increase the percentage of processes that are digital and self-service-enabled. People participation increases as the communication language is user-friendly enough to achieve common business objectives and targets via a co-ordinated effort hosted from a single repository.

BPM ensures similar processes from various divisions can be consolidated over time to standardise across the enterprise and to minimise the cost of ownership.

Enterprise application integration allows the BPM solution to integrate seamlessly with existing applications as opposed to the traditional integration gaps or time-consuming integration projects.

Standards such as XML, BPMN, BPEL ensure development time can be reduced significantly.

Compliance initiatives are dependant on document management and traceability.

Document management solutions achieve the routing of documents, but they lack the BPM ability to create complex, non-document-related processes.

Easy administration and efficient design tools encourage business ownership.

BPM provides an insulated layer to ensure process owners can manage and change processes, priorities and workload balancing without system personnel necessarily leading the change initiative.

Traditional reporting was based on carefully selected statistical collection and developed management reporting. BPM suites are shipped with built in real-time monitoring and flexible reporting capabilities that can be configured by the business if and when change is required.

BPM provides organisations with an opportunity to create a competitive advantage by performing familiar activities in a synchronised and co-ordinated fashion.

Success is dependant on a complementary effort from process and technology.