A successful implementation of a business process management (BPM) suite that provides a full, roundtrip process lifecycle for both human-centric and system-based processes requires certain essential elements, together with a complement of advanced features. Without the essentials, any implementation is likely to be long, painful and less beneficial than it potentially could be; it may even fail altogether.
Essential features a BPM suite should contain include the ability to:
* Design and model a process in a graphical format that can be owned and maintained by the process owner and can be easily published for process execution.
* Execute and manage both simple and complex processes via a robust, scalable process engine.
* Create online forms that will flow through a process, thereby helping eliminate paper.
* Accommodate dynamic roles in an organisation and automatically adapt content and key performance data to give each individual their own unique viewpoint into a process.
* Provide a single user view across an entire process and enable accessibility through a variety of portals such as SharePoint, Outlook, the Web and mobile devices.
* Easily provide access to, manage and control the content that people need to make intelligent decisions during the process and to generate an automatic audit trail for compliance.
* Monitor process activity, gain instantaneous visibility into process content and status, and generate reports to facilitate process improvements.
* Simulate the impact of process changes using live process data and enable real-time changes or additions to process flows, roles and forms, and the ability to quickly and easily add new processes without slowing down or impacting business operations.
* Easily integrate with a wide variety of disparate applications such as .NET, Java and legacy frameworks so that existing infrastructure can be used fully and extend the benefits derived from BPM across the business.
* Use the latest technologies, such as Web services and provide a framework that will help move toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment to ensure optimum interoperability.
* Easily configure the solution to meet business-specific process needs.
Cut above the rest
However, the most effective BPM suite provides more than just the essentials. It also offers advanced capabilities. Companies need to weigh which of these advanced features are most important in the short term and take into consideration what they will want to leverage in future.
Advanced features in a BPM suite should include advanced reporting and business intelligence capabilities that allow companies to analyse both real-time and historical data as well as look at time-phased performance. This capability should be an integrated part of the suite and should use the live process database so that decisions can be based on actual, up to the minute information.
Advanced features in a BPM suite should include advanced reporting and business intelligence capabilities.
Trevor van Rensburg, heads up the products business in DVT
Advanced business rules management is important if there is a need to manage and maintain large rule sets and use them across multiple processes, or if the system is required to analyse and automatically execute different process flows based on certain conditions. This enables the automation of large portions of the process and minimise the impact of rule changes while at the same time ensuring consistent enforcement of policies across the company and processes.
Advanced modelling and simulation provides the ability to not only model graphical representations of a process, but also to simulate the impacts of changes to a process to measure its effect on numerous variables including cost, profitability, resource use, throughput speed and other critical business objectives.
The modelling and simulation environment must be coupled with the rest of the BPM suite to ensure the business is working with accurate, live process data and to ensure that process changes can be applied quickly from the simulation environment to the execution environment.
Statistical analysis models such as Six Sigma should be readily available and work in the simulation environment. Robust capabilities in this area are critical to process improvement.
Advanced integration and legacy control features are especially critical to organisations with a large number of system-based processes or a heterogeneous IT environment.
Advanced integration capabilities will support not only point-to-point communication but also allow the BPM suite to manage and control processes executing on other systems so that the suite remains the top-level orchestrator of the entire process.
While many of these advanced features are offered as standalone applications by a variety of vendors, only by tying them into a BPM suite can a business gain the benefits of a faster implementation, single interface, single vendor support and lower total cost of ownership. Altogether, the company will have a BPM suite that will give it the edge over its competitors.
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