Pelagic Technologies

What is BPM?

More and more businesses are beginning to adopt a new corporate discipline widely known as BPM, or Business Process Management. Though there still is confusion about the term BPM, it in the first line expresses the departure from 'merely' re-engineering a company's processes to the end-to-end management of a set of processes. In a way BPM is a logical conclusion of BPR for companies which have mastered the improvement of selected mission critical vertical processes. To generate further value, businesses move on to enhance the value of each individual process improvement by ensuring that the processes are harmonized and mutually supportive across the enterprise. The underlying economical assumption of BPM is that the sum of well orchestrated process benefits will be larger than the sum of individual (unharmonized) process improvements themselves. In contrast to Process Re-design, BPM does not focus on a selected process capability, application feature or KPI, but addresses the management of how the various process capabilities should interact with another, of how all applications can be designed in a common approach or access in a single way. KPIs are not tracked within a single unit but new process KPIs are developed. In our opinion, maximum operational effectiveness can be achieved by organizations which continue to re-invent their processes for each vertical process (BPR) but do so within an organized and management framework (BPM). As a result companies will be more agile, more flexible to change and will recognize their process maturity as a key competitive advantage.

There are several tracks an organization must embark onto to develop this new corporate discipline. The most critical two of these are the organizational and technology alignment:

Organizational BPM

The development of a core organizational discipline will require significant realignment of the organizational structures to succeed. Particularly in the case of BPM, where organizations try to establish new cross functional communication lines, it can be essential to re-assign ownerships, budget responsibilities and job descriptions. Over the long term companies must assign their bet staff to own process chains, redesign their KPIs to measure end to end cycles not units and re-train their employees and thus create subtle but fundamental shifts from product or division driven businesses to process centric enterprises.

Technical BPM

From a technical perspective, BPM entails the seamless amalgamation of business process modeling, integration, and workflow technologies. BPM allows users to model an end-to-end business process (both manual and automated steps), and consolidate processes that span existing applications, and deploy end-to-end processes with little (if any) programming. Once defined, a BPM Solution then manages the execution of process instances in a real time environment. By summarizing various technical components with all their in- and output data into modeling objects, BPM allows the business to quickly reconfigure and adapt processes just by re-modeling. In contrast, current generation applications embed business processes within rigid software code and database tables, making process change complex and costly. BPM solutions also allow for process tracking in an unprecedented way. Rather than depending on tracking points given by legacy systems, BPM solutions allow you to point to any particular event in the process chain and capture the performance data in real time. Hence BPM solutions can provide for essential data input for continuous process improvement methods.