Achieve business agility with BPM

Developing new business, entering new markets, creating new sales models and building efficient electronic procurement channels while integrating existing ones, requires business agility. Failure to adapt may mean going out of business.

Enter business process management (BPM), which allows processes to be modelled and then dynamically maintained as business requirements are refined or modified, in relation to changing business needs.

Remember the Hershey Food Corporation disaster in 1999? The company`s new software system cost it $150 million in lost sales. It was supposed to automate shipments of chocolates and sweets in time for Halloween trick-or-treating, but it malfunctioned, leaving retailers` shelves bare. Hershey did not know who had ordered what as there was no inventory. It took the company a year to recover from this disaster.

The lesson here is that companies that learn to integrate IT resources into their strategic business plans will have a significant competitive advantage over those that lag behind. This requires moving IT decision-making from the tactical, technical level to the strategic business level. Those that ignore this reality will find it increasingly difficult to communicate with customers, vendors and business. Many will fail.

Success in today`s rapidly changing business environment demands that companies integrate their business processes across different vertical markets and various operating environments. Integration enables disparate business resources inside and outside an organisation to work together to support a company`s business strategy.

A BPM solution is the collection of instruments with which you can model your enterprise business processes, perform activity-based costing, simulate the processes and deploy them. Then, while the processes are being executed, you can monitor and manage them.

Success in today`s rapidly changing business environment demands that companies integrate their business processes across different vertical markets and various operating environments.

Victoria Vaksman, MD, Tilos Business Solutions

Efficient BPM integration allows new business applications to be created and lets companies differentiate themselves through their streamlined interactions with customers. BPM automates the transactions between a company`s IT resources, and monitors business processes while executing them, making activities visible, measurable and auditable across the organisation.

Just about everything in a company is process-based, regardless of whether these processes have been automated, or even identified. BPM allows activities and transactions to take place concurrently, across multiple systems.

Furthermore, it effectively takes the control of business processes out of IT and returns this to business people. This means that managers can modify business processes and quickly adapt them to changing economic conditions or requirements. BPM also provides decision-makers with up-to-the-minute business information, allowing them to make better business decisions immediately.

This level of empowerment is also extended to applications: BPM combines legacy applications and adapts them to business needs; previously, applications forced companies to adhere to their "best practices".

Business processes implement the vision and strategy of a company, and are its mainstay. They define the way a company interacts with its internal and external entities - be they applications, employees, partners, suppliers or customers. As such, they are highly suitable for automation and its resultant business benefits. However, it is the agility of business processes that will determine whether or not a company is able to adapt in the face of external business challenges, market forces and opportunities.

Companies must be able to respond to these challenges and opportunities while meeting or exceeding customer expectations through added value offerings.

There are many channels through which business transactions can be conducted today. Companies are therefore also required to provide consistent service levels across all these different business channels so as to ensure consistency of service and positive customer experience. BPM enables multi-channel reach, managing, optimising and measuring the end-to-end processes that enable customers to interact with the company through whichever channel they choose.

A fully integrated BPM solution not only enables you to know what is going on in your company, thereby allowing you to align business processes with business objectives, but it also provides the visibility, measurability and auditability companies need in order to have optimal control of every process. This in turn enables you to capitalise on the information embedded in company software and employees` minds. The resulting alignment of IT with the organisation`s business objectives puts management back in control of the business, delivering all the benefits of true business integration. Perhaps most important among these is the agility referred to above, that enables a company to rapidly change business logic so as to be flexible and adaptable in the face of changing environments and scenarios.

Among the most profound changes BPM has wrought is its altering of the way business units and IT relate to each other. This results not only in technological change, but also in organisational change - down to the way departments and employees actually interact - and true evolution.