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BPM...

It's more than just managing transactions.

Samantha Perry
By Samantha Perry, co-founder of WomeninTechZA
Johannesburg, 17 May 2010

Business process management (BPM), simply put, is an activity that aims to manage and continuously improve an organisation's business processes, ie, those chains of activities and events that result in a thing being produced or completed - eg, the process of manufacturing goods, or generating an invoice. Frequently, BPM involves automating said processes first.

Then there's workflow, which, per SearchCIO.com, “is a term used to describe the tasks, procedural steps, organisations or people involved, required input and output information, and tools needed for each step in a business process”. This is the part of the BPM family that has achieved the greatest traction in the local market. Very few companies are doing 'real' BPM, however, which means that few are reaping the benefits.

What can BPM do? As Global 360 regional sales director Tim Stanley puts it: “Done right, BPM means less paper, less admin and more efficiency and better insight into the business. Since nearly every business is in most aspects process-driven, managing those processes effectively means identifying if, where and how there is room for improvement. BPM, of course, is not just a technology: it's also a management discipline.”

“Local companies are definitely confusing managing transactions with BPM,” says HP Software + Solutions technical consultant Shane David. “We see a transaction as a bigger part of a business process. Business processes should be defined first, and the technology feed it from the bottom.”

“With BPM, the real benefit is that it gives customers agility - the ability to reconfigure processes based on something they can see in their business as an opportunity,” says SAP chief technology architect Alvin Paules. “Typically, if you look at a business, there are processes that are fairly static (normally back-end applications like general ledger, etc) and then there are those that present a real opportunity for either continuous change or incrementally giving the company a competitive advantage.”

This is where the real opportunity lies. Organisations need to innovate. They need to interact and transact in real-time. They need to be closer to customers and suppliers than ever, literally in their pockets. And they need IT to enable this.

“The real benefit we see is that it gives the company an opportunity to be more agile and flexible,” emphasises Paules. “What we've got is all this functionality sitting in the back-end; BPM can create processes across the actual silos (that characterise most IT architectures).”

But, as mentioned, local companies have to get there first.

Baby steps

Says HP's David: “Where to start? Planning is very, very important. We suggest lots of time be spent in the design phase. Get consultants in to either engineer business processes, or re-engineer them to meet the business requirements. And you have to get the users' requirements - it can't just be business-driven. You need user buy-in and to ensure users get proper education and training.”

Stanley echoes this. “The major issue with BPM is that it has focused on the process to the exclusion of the people who work within the process. While automation of workflows and activities and the movement of artefacts through the process are very important, it has to be done in a manner that supports and enhances the functions of the people within the process. This is something that almost no vendor in the industry has, to date, considered. The process should support the people within it; the BPM solution should be accessible and not a complexity that makes work harder. That's where 'Persona-based' BPM stands out; it is BPM designed for use by people.”

Local companies are definitely confusing managing transactions with BPM.

Shane David, technical consultant, HP

Getting the basics and the people done is critical. So is the back-end, as Paules notes. “We believe you won't get the benefits of BPM unless you've got a stable set of back-end components. It doesn't have to be SOA as there is governance around the functionality that you can manipulate with the BPM layer. So you first need stability in your services. Given that you've done that properly, the next thing you need to do is understand where the strategic opportunities are for your organisation and hone in on those processes.

“A company may want to differentiate itself in the services it offers, so the processes used to provide those are the ones that they should BPM-enable. The mistake that many companies make is that they see BPM as a tool for everything. It can't fix everything - some things should be left in the old, hard-coded way. What you do change should give you the strategic advantage you're looking for.

“The other thing we've found, like a stable back-end, we're noticing more and more that BPM is more successful when linked to a business rules engine. People make the mistake of trying to build them into the process; rather keep them separate and get more flexibility,” he comments.

Don't forget data

Of course, what BPM and the like are really all about is data - and how to use it to innovate and gain competitive advantage. Says Software AG sales director Emma Murray: “With the new era of real-time process management and intelligence soon to replace the rear-view centric BI world, this will certainly place emphasis on the fact that any customer running a legacy application (which, according to Gartner, is anything that runs in production), can extract that process and run it in a process engine for a real-time solution regardless of the back-end systems.

“Customers need to focus on what their data is worth now. Sadly, it is the customer who suffers at the end of the day when they have spent millions on rewrites and rip-and-replace strategies only to find they have less than 50% of their original functionality at twice the cost. Perhaps the conversation with customers that are looking at modernising should go along the lines of: what is your data worth and what does it do for your bottom line?”

The end of the rear-view mirror is also highlighted by Stanley: “With the pace of change in the economy and the world around us, the ability to accurately see what is going on in processes provides agility. It's not the big eating the small any longer; it's the fast eating the slow. Real-time insight means real-time action; that is what competitiveness rests upon. While BI gives a view of what is happening in a business, it tends to be more of a rear-view mirror. Being able to see a process in action, and amend it should performance move out of predefined parameters, provides the ability to influence strategic and operational performance as it happens.”

... it gives the company an opportunity to be more agile and flexible.

Alvin Paules, chief technology architect, SAP

And that's the promise of BPM. As Murray mentions, this promise is frequently sold on the back of a rip-and-replace strategy, which, she believes, isn't necessary.

“So much of the information companies need to access cannot necessarily be accessed by many solutions, so a big rip-and-replace drive gets pushed into the corporation to facilitate the promise of BPM. We don't believe you need to do that. Customers should expect not to rip-and-replace, to have faster time to market; they should expect to deliver the first iteration of the business value to the business case within a few months and should be able to unlock silos of data to deliver the flow that is across silos, which is the way business functions. Business doesn't work in silos; it works across accounts, R&D, manufacturing, logistics and so on.”

“BPM offers ability to measure what you are currently doing,” says Software AG sales director Garth Meier, “which is a challenge in any enterprise. Knowing what your data is worth requires some measurement, and not just cost, but how it impacts the business.”

And that is the business-relevant clich'e of your choice, because data can impact a business catastrophically or fabulously, depending on how you manage and use it. BPM helps. So do many other IT management philosophies and tools. Recognising the importance of the data, and that no tool or technology can fix the business for you, is where it has to start, though, and here South Africa is still lagging.

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