Business process is where integration, consolidation should start

Cordys, the world's leading supplier of software for business process innovation, believes the ability to improve business processes on the fly will be key to South Africa's competitiveness in a connected global economy.

“The heart of every organisation's operations is its business processes,” says Cordys South Africa managing director, Mike Rolfe. “The way you take and process orders, pay staff, place orders on your suppliers, manage leave, track parts, and invoice customers are all specific processes that work more or less well, depending on how you've set them up - and, most importantly, on how your technology systems place limits on them.

“Without those processes, your organisation simply cannot function. So, the ability to continuously and rapidly refine them to better meet the needs of the organisation or to increase productivity and profitability is profoundly important to the sustainability and competitiveness of your organisation.

“It's at the business process level, too, that mergers and acquisitions and, therefore, organisational growth, can be either impeded or facilitated. The ability to easily and quickly impose preferred business processes on an acquired organisation or to adopt better business processes from that organisation into your own is invariably what makes the difference between the success or failure of the combined entity.

“In addition, today, business processes need to extend beyond your own organisation into the supply or value chain and, sooner or later, into the cloud.

“In other words, business processes are where organisations should start when they're thinking about integration and consolidation of functions and activities. An integrated technology system isn't much use unless the business processes it enables are the ones that best suit and support the organisation.”

The problem, however, is that most organisations don't or won't focus on business process management (BPM) and improvement because, until now, information technology hasn't been designed to support BPM.

According to Rolfe, to some extent, that's been a result of technology being initially designed around disciplines - most notably finance and manufacturing - other than BPM. Software design for businesses has been focused on enabling control of the business rather than making the business more agile.

“Also, the technology itself hasn't been particularly agile or flexible. It was only when services-orientated architecture (SOA) became a reality that it was possible to change an application or functionality without extensive, time-consuming, expensive recoding of the application.

“What was also needed was a graphical interface that is actually a programming language in disguise, allowing business users to change technology processes simply by drawing on a screen the process they want. The software underlying the graphic automatically translates the drawing into executable processes. From the moment the graphic is published, the new process runs - and the organisation begins to cash in.”

Implicit in that idea is the necessity for the underlying BPM software to interface smoothly with all operating systems, inside and outside the organisation, so as to be able to effect the required process changes at every point in the value chain - without disrupting the underlying operational systems.

“What's happened is that an agility layer has been added to the IT landscape,” Rolfe says. “So, it is now possible to build processes that are independent of the life cycle of the underlying systems. You can refine your order handling process, for example, independently of the version of the ERP system you happen to be using - and independently of the version on which your suppliers are running.

“You can't do away with the underlying ERP, accounting, manufacturing or other systems, because you need their specific functionality. But you can continuously improve the way you make them work for you.

“In a connected global economy, that's competitiveness at its most fundamental.”