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Business Process Management

Business Process Management can be a confusing term especially when terms such as Service Oriented Architecture, Business Architecture, Business Rules, and Organizational Performance are all used when referring to Business Process Management (BPM).  Organizations are struggling to comprehend and assimilate these technologies in order to get a better view of its strategy and processes.

Currently most organizations function in silos with technology enabling, supporting and alienating parts of the organization based on transactional computing. For instance an order entry system supports only the process of entering orders whereas the billing system allows only invoice creation.  Over the years organizations have made attempts to link these disparate systems together to get a comprehensive picture of a transaction and although that has been a great start it is not enough to enable the organization to function seamlessly. 

BPM systems today enable the automation of a complete workflow across business functional units and provide an end-to-end view of a complete process, making visible those links in the chain that normally stayed hidden and became the cause at times for broken or inefficient processing.

Experts contend that enabling an enterprise to be process-driven makes it agile, customer-focused, and competitive. However, architecting a solution that can leverage the strength of business process management and automation requires a complete understanding of business goals, identification of mission-critical business processes, and a clear understanding of what the outcomes should be when the process is automated or optimized.

“The most invaluable outcome of our engagement for our customer was that they finally had a complete understanding of how their process worked.  This happened slowly over the duration of our effort to automate their loan processing process. We are better off today with just that understanding than before we started this initiative” said Dewey Clanton, practice manager for Xpediants’ Business Process Management Practice.

The Xpediant BPM team has battle scars that prove they know the turmoil an organization experiences as they transition into a process-driven organization. From a base understanding of your organization’s vision, mission, and values, our team can guide your organization through defining, designing, implementing and optimizing your organization’s business-critical processes transforming it into a competitive, customer-focused group to contend with.


At Xpediant we use a rigorous but flexible methodology for delivering your custom business solution.  From establishing a business case, to gathering requirements, developing and implementing a solution, and deploying the solution to end users, our solutions team takes no shortcuts but knows where to leverage efficiencies to benefit the customer.
 



The difference with BPM solutions from other portal solutions is in the details of each of these steps and that each one is viewed from a business (and ultimately, process) centric philosophy.  For instance, with a BPM solution:

  1. A business case for a BPM solution may read like this; "By reviewing, re-factoring, and enhancing the recruiting process, the company intends to realize a 25% improvement in the number of rejected employment offers."

  2. High-level requirements may say "The recruiting process shall record and report the number of employment offers, the number of accepted employment offers, and the number of rejected employment offers, along with specific reasons for each."

  3. Detailed requirements will include statements such as, "The recruiting process shall provide a lifecycle history of employment offers, retaining each change in the employment offer with respect to the date of issue, the compensation offer, the terms of employment, and the candidate's response and reasons for rejection (if any).  Each of these attributes will be retained for the standard documentation retention period as outlined in....  The reasons for rejection of an employment offer shall be categorized.  The categories for rejection shall be configurable by an administrative user as outlined in..."

  4. During construction (coding / implementation), the goal of the solution should be flexibility to allow for change in the near term as well as the longer term requirements.  Since the goal of BPM is to be able to identify earlier and better how well a solution is supporting business goals, it is important for that solution to be able to change so that when change is needed, the system can respond accordingly.  For all BPM tools, this is the major design point.  Most tools now have the capability to alter their internal process design fairly easily making process change easier than it used to be.

The important point is that the solution has a process view along with a longer-term strategy for understanding the process(es) and for making the process(es) and the company(s) more agile or nimble.  The goal of BPM is to be able to identify where the business is either missing the business target(s) or to determine if the business is headed in the right direction but needs improvement.  In either case, a 'way' to 'see' this behavior within an organization is by building IT systems that have the ability to report on their respective health as it relates to the business.  In the past, IT systems generally left reporting as an afterthought of the development process, and those reports that actually were created tended to be technical in nature - information about the technical health of the solution, not the health of the solution with respect to business goals.
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