Business process management: The key to end-to-end process control

Interoperability - the ability of systems and solutions to work smoothly and co-operatively together - is a goal towards which many enterprises strive. Once realised, the transparent access to a cohesive set of applications becomes achievable, which ultimately improves efficiencies and provides users with instantaneous access to information.

This goal of the "intelligent business" has driven enterprises to continually improve their application infrastructure, with workflow being increasingly seen as an intrinsic component of this model. However, enterprise-wide business process management (BPM) is now emerging as the key technology that holistically manages the corporate business processes, controlling the various sub-processes across disparate applications, linking them together at a higher, more strategic, level.

Workflow products have traditionally been strong in human-to-human type flows, but a relentless pursuit by customers for more and more process automation has resulted in these products becoming increasingly stronger in straight through processing (STP) or system-to-system type flows.

In contrast, middleware has focused on system-to-system application integration and the processes involved in transferring control from one system to another. It uses intelligent, rules-based routing where activities are short and automated, ensuring the secure delivery of a contextual message. It is, however, extremely focused on the underlying data and not on the actual corporate business process that spawned the transaction.

In addition to this, the duration of business process activities can range from seconds to several weeks, should complex sub-processes be involved. The ideal situation would be to have an over-arching management process that can control and track what the applications - and the users - do from the time they receive the messages to the time they process them.

Even in the most automated straight through process, human intervention is almost inevitable, from the back office handling exceptions, through to the front office interacting with the customer via the call centre or through customer relationship management solutions. BPM combines the best of the human elements of workflow products with the best of the system elements of EAI products, achieving end-to-end process control.

Business process management is capable of coordinating new and existing services including administration, customer relationship management (CRM) and channel management and can act as the facilitator in moving contextual data between applications. It allows scalable straight through processing in 24x7 environments via controlled transactions; exception handling by humans, where necessary; and management control over the entire process.

An additional tool for achieving rapid process deployment is the development of the sub-procedure or business object. Breaking a procedure down into a number of logical blocks can greatly simplify a process that is to be implemented within a BPM solution. By maintaining a central repository of business objects, a Business Analyst can rapidly piece together the skeleton of a process template, adding the complexities later in the development cycle.

This provides a window of opportunity to new entrepreneurial companies that have the knowledge to create world-class business objects and a focus on continuously refining them. For example, credit-scoring engines are now commonplace within loan processes.

Any customer-facing organisation`s ideal scenario is to have a seamless interface between its delivery channels and its other areas of business. By providing its customer service representatives with instantaneous access to its business intelligence, a company can increase its levels of customer service as well as decreasing response time for transactions and queries.

Due to BPM`s ability to automatically route tasks to the relevant person, a higher level of pro-active customer service can also be achieved. Service levels can be set, maintained and continuously improved upon for each step within the process, raising alerts and escalations should they be exceeded. This is ultimately what business process automation should be achieving.

There are a number of critical factors that can influence the interaction between a customer and their supplier. These include:

A single point of contact:
When contacting a company, the customer wants to solve problems and queries through a single point of contact.

Knowledge:
The company needs intimate knowledge of the customer, their requirements and their buying patterns as well as possible preferences for certain items.

Convenience:
The company needs to be contactable at any time, day or night, through any channel the customer wishes.

Total service:
Customers expect complete management of their order from initial request to the fulfilment of a product or service.

Capable of tracking progress:
All requests for the status of transactions and queries to be instantaneously available.

Pro-active service:
Customers also want their suppliers to be pro-active by providing them helpful services they haven`t even thought of yet.

All these criteria depend on a high level of business process management, that BPM solutions can provide, through the development and refinement of ever-greater levels of process management and integration.