Business process management (BPM) is a management concept whose scope is to help managing all the specific activities within an organization in accordance with the customer needs and requirements. Business process management is based on flexibility, efficiency and integration of the business with the information technology. It is a real business optimization tool, helping companies to improve their IT systems and the business processes in the same time and to optimize their activities.
Under the concept of Business Process Management, the processes are considered as a strategic asset of the company and they are mirrored in the organization global costs. For this reason, the management representatives within a company must clearly understand, manage and optimize all the business processes, in order to minimize the expenses and to maximize the profit, offering in the meantime a high level of value to the clients. In this situation is normal that BMP represent a change management strategy, regarding both the human resources and the information technology.
BPM concept is a synthesis between the automation work processes, the human activities and the operations management. BPM offers a detailed and global image of all the business processes and the activities within a company, delivering, in the same time, the best business processes model and designing the relationship between the operations. Business Process Management provides also an advanced reporting and analysis system, in order to better manage and optimize the work process.
Business Process Management is a flexible and innovative concept, able to transform itself and to improve its elements in accordance with the consumer needs and requirements, as well as to adapt its strategies to the fast and multiple modifications of the international regulatory standards and demands.
BPM includes a series of steps to be followed in order to improve the work processes management. The first of these steps is the process design. It supposes the identification of the actual work processes (with the human resources responsible for them, the systems and applications, the errors, the notifications and present solutions) and the design of the processes as they should be in order to reduce the costs, to simplify the people work and effort and to increase, in this way, the organization profit. The processes improvements cover the employees, the infrastructure and the applications, respecting the local and the international rules and regulations.
Another important step within Business Process Management is represented by the modeling of the designed processes. This step supposes to adapt the theoretical standard work processes at the specific reality of that company, which is different in accordance with the industry vertical, the management style, the organization cultural level etc. These standard operations must be modeled in accordance with the global economic status and respecting its trend on medium and long term.
Another important step is the implementation of these theoretical and modeled steps. The best solution for this is to buy a comprehensive application able to execute the big majority of the designed processes and to combine the automate operations execution with the human resources activities. In this situation, it's vital to take enough time in order to test both the application and the employees' activity, to identify the errors or the weaknesses and to correct them.
The best strategy to identify the errors is to permanently monitor the application and the way it is used. The individual standard processes should be analyzed in order to establish their performance and their success rate, as well as to compare the present results with those initially designed. This statistics will help identify correctly and to solve in due time all the problems, as well as to optimize the company management (for example, if somebody has a 50% error rate in his work, the management can check and act in consequence: or the procedure is bad and it must be improved, or the employee is not the right person for that job and he or she must be trained or reallocated in order to maximize the company productivity and efficiency).
Another step of the BPM is the optimization. Even from the phase of modeling, but certainly after a serious monitoring activity, the processes can be improved in order to simplify the work flow, to increase the people efficiency, for greater business value.
The final step of the BPM concept is the practice. After the design, model, implementation and optimization of the processes, is very important to put them in practice and to use them as they are for a certain period of time. This strategy helps the companies get relevant statistics and analysis, on whose basis the company representatives can decide to transform the organizational culture and to adapt it to the actual work processes and to use these processes in a natural way.
More technically speaking, there is a series of essential elements covered by the BPM suite:
- Process Engine - that model and execute process-based applications
- Business Analytics - that help identifying business issues, trends, and opportunities
- Content Management - that help storing and securing electronic information
- Collaboration Tools - assures the internal communication through discussion forums, dynamic workspaces and message boards
