Johannesburg, 19 Apr 2012
Business process management (BPM) is not about modelling, but is rather about seeing models executed in a manner that delivers business efficiency.
So said Carl Townsend, services director at K2, speaking at the ITWeb BPM Summit, at The Forum, in Bryanston, yesterday.
According to Townsend, the main objective of implementing BPM in an organisation is to realise return on investment. “BPM helps organisations to get both direct and indirect financial gains,” he said.
“Some of the indirect financial gains include efficiency improvement, staff retention through increased morale, and it also enables businesses to reallocate staff to more needy areas. On the direct financial gains, BPM ensures that enterprises reduce the running costs of their business,” he added.
Townsend also highlighted some BPM design methodologies that he said most businesses are implementing.
First, he referred to the 'iterative approach', which he said develops a small number of workflow steps and then keeps reworking these based on stakeholder feedback.
“There's also the 'overarching approach', which develops the high level process end-to-end, but keeps detailed steps manual and avoids integration at first. This approach progressively builds up detail and integration through subsequent iterations.”
The 'low-hanging fruit approach', said Townsend, develops the simplest process first.
Finally, the 'slice approach' develops a single process from the front-end, through the workflow, all the way to line-of-business system integration.
According to Townsend, different approaches produce different results for different organisations, depending on their needs.
Townsend, however, cautioned organisations against having 'big bang' approaches in their BPM implementations, saying these approaches look sound theoretically, but, in reality, they take ages to implement.
Before implementing a new BPM solution, he urged businesses to firstly “take a second look at their current processes.
“Talk to everyone in the process, not just the process expert. Do not automate a wrong or bad process. You should focus on identifying a successful implementation,” he urged.
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