2. BASIC INTRODUCTION
• Business process management (BPM) is a systematic approach to making an organization's workflow more effective, more efficient and
more capable of adapting to an ever-changing environment. A business process is an activity or set of activities that will accomplish a
specific organizational goal.
• Gartner defines Business Process Management as “a discipline that improves enterprise performance by driving operational excellence and
business agility.” Think of a business as an engine and BPM as a tool to fine-tune every component of that engine in order to achieve
maximum performance and you’ve got the idea.
• The goal of BPM is to reduce human error and miscommunication and focus stakeholders on the requirements of their roles. BPM is a
subset of infrastructure management , an administrative area concerned with maintaining and optimizing an organization's equipment and
core operations.
3. BASIC INTRODUCTION
• BPM is often a point of connection within a company between the line-of-business and the IT department. Business Process
Execution Language and Business Process Management Notation were both created to facilitate communication between IT and
the LOB. Both languages are easy to read and learn, so that business people can quickly learn to use them and design processes.
Both BPEL and BPMN adhere to the basic rules of programming, so that processes designed in either language are easy for
developers to translate into hard code.
• As a policy-making approach, BPM sees processes as important assets of an organization that must be understood,
managed, and developed to announce value-added products and services to clients or customers. This approach
closely resembles other total quality management or continual improvement process methodologies and BPM
proponents also claim that this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology. As such, many BPM
articles and scholars frequently discuss BPM from one of two viewpoints: people and/or technology. (Contd.)
4. INTRODUCTORY CONCEPTS
• Business Process Model: A Business Process Model (BPMd) typically consists of workflow diagrams,
descriptions, inputs and outputs, KPIs and data that provide both overview and detailed information
about an organization’s business processes.
• BPM Software: Software that allows users to create BPM diagrams and integrate process content with
critical business entities (departments, resources, etc.)
• Business Process Re-engineering (BPR):The realignment of business process strategies through the use
of an analytic tool and an intense consultation process. BPR is an off-shoot of BPM implementation that
involves a great deal of risk due to change management.
5. INTRODUCTORY CONCEPTS
• Business Process Design (BPD): BPD is the systematic working by which an
organization understands, defines and documents the business activities that
enable it to function efficiently, effectively and economically.
• Business Process Model (BPMd): Illustrated description of business processes,
usually created with flow diagrams. The model contains the relationship
between activities, processes, sub-processes and information, as well as roles,
the organization and resources. It is also termed as Business Process Mapping.
6. REFERENCE TERMS
• Process :Sequence of interdependent and interlinked activities which, at every stage, consume one or
more resources (employee time, energy, machines, money) to convert inputs (data, material, parts, etc.) into outputs.
• Sub-process : A sub-process is a compound activity that is included within a task (process). Each task may have its own sub-
processes. Each sub-process can also contain other sub-processes.
• Activities : Activities are the lowest-level process steps in modeling software where actual work is performed. Activities
cannot be broken down into further steps.
• Process Owner : The person (Resource) responsible for the process.
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) : KPIs are descriptive time, cost or quality indicators used to capture the performance of
a process.
7. • In order to become and remain successful and competitive, businesses must continuously improve their processes.
Failure to do so is likely to result in higher costs, lower revenues, less motivated employees and fewer satisfied
customers.
• Business Process Management (BPM) is a powerful tool businesses can use to keep all aspects of operations running
optimally. For those considering investing in it to drive process improvement, here’s a brief overview of why your
company needs business process management.
NEED
8. BENEFITS OF BPM
Improves process quality, reliability and output.
Helps for continuous process improvement that provides foundations for BPR.
Maximizes process visibility that helps in reducing costs.
Improves strategic decision-making by providing correct information at correct time. It provides end-to-end performance visibility and
optimization of resources.
Improves operational efficiency that results in the avoidance of wastage and loss of company resources.
Consistent execution reduces process cycle time.
Improves customer satisfaction by delivering better and enhanced value.
Promotes organizational flexibility and business agility.
Promotes communication and collaboration between departments.
Helps in standardization of procedures.
Helps in measuring KPIs and thus improves accountability.
Promotes safe working conditions that protect company resources.
Defines roles and responsibilities that increases employee efficiency and satisfaction.
Simplifies regulatory compliance.
11. DESIGN
• Process Design encompasses both the identification of existing processes and the design of "to-be"
processes. Areas of focus include representation of the process flow, the actors within it, alerts &
notifications, escalations, Standard Operating Procedures, Service Level Agreements, and task hand-over
mechanisms.
• Good design reduces the number of problems over the lifetime of the process. Whether or not existing
processes are considered, the aim of this step is to ensure that a correct and efficient theoretical design
is prepared.
• The proposed improvement could be in human-to-human, human-to-system, and system-to-system
workflows, and might target regulatory, market, or competitive challenges faced by the businesses.
12. MODELING
• The output of a BPD project is a streamlined, comprehensive, easy-to-use
model of the ways in which a business delivers output to its customers.
One of the key purposes of process modeling is to provide a “process
view” of the business.
• BPMd typically consists of a set of diagrams, textual descriptions and data
elements that provide both overview and detailed information about the
business processes in a format that is easily understood by everyone.
13. EXECUTION
• One of the ways to automate processes is to develop or purchase an application that executes the required steps of
the process; however, in practice, these applications rarely execute all the steps of the process accurately or
completely. Another approach is to use a combination of software and human intervention; however this approach
is more complex, making the documentation process difficult.
• As a response to these problems, software has been developed that enables the full business process (as developed
in the process design activity) to be defined in a computer language which can be directly executed by the computer.
The system will either use services in connected applications to perform business operations (e.g. calculating a
repayment plan for a loan) or, when a step is too complex to automate, will ask for human input. Compared to either
of the previous approaches, directly executing a process definition can be more straightforward and therefore easier
to improve.
• Business rules have been used by systems to provide definitions for governing behavior, and a business rule engine
can be used to drive process execution and resolution.
14. MONITORING
• The Monitor Phase is where process performance is measured. Monitoring encompasses the tracking of
individual processes, so that information on their state can be easily seen, and statistics on the performance of
one or more processes can be provided. An example of the tracking is being able to determine the state of a
customer order (e.g. ordered arrived, awaiting delivery, invoice paid) so that problems in its operation can be
identified and corrected.
• In addition, this information can be used to work with customers and suppliers to improve their connected
processes. Examples of the statistics are the generation of measures on how quickly a customer order is
processed or how many orders were processed in the last month. These measures tend to fit into three
categories: cycle time, defect rate and productivity.
• The degree of monitoring depends on what information the business wants to evaluate and analyze and how
business wants it to be monitored, in real-time, near real-time or ad-hoc. Here, business activity monitoring
(BAM) extends and expands the monitoring tools in generally provided by BPM System (BPMS).
15. OPTIMIZING
• Process optimization includes retrieving process performance information from modeling or
monitoring phase; identifying the potential or actual bottlenecks and the potential
opportunities for cost savings or other improvements; and then, applying those enhancements
in the design of the process. Overall, this creates greater business value.
17. FREQUENTLY USED TERMS
# Abbreviations Complete Term
1 IT Information Technology
2 BPD Business Process Design
3
BPM
Business Process
Management
4 BPMd Business Process Model
5
BPMS
Business Process
Management Suites
6 KPIs Key Performance Indicators
18.
19. BPM SOFTWARES
# BPM Software Website
1 Accu Process Modeler http://www.accuprocess.com
2 RunMyJobs http://www.runmyjobs.com
3 BPMS http://www.sydle.com
4 BPM from IBM http://www-142.ibm.com
5 ProcessMaker http://www.processmaker.com
6 Appian BPM Suite http://www.appian.com
7 webMethods BPMS http://www.softwareag.com
8 Ultimus BPM & Workflow Solution Software http://www.ultimus.com
9 Progress® Savvion®, http://www.progress.com
10 Sequence KineticsTM BPM Software http://www.pnmsoft.com/
11 Oracle Business Process Management Suite http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/bpm
12 Skelta BPM & Workflow Software http://www.skelta.com
13 SharePoint 2010 https://www.microsoft.com
20. PUBLISHED BOOKS
# Title of Book Publisher
1 B u s i n e s s P r o c e s s M a n a g e m e n t S p r i n g l e r
2 B u s i n e s s P r o c e s s M a n a g e m e n t
B P M 1 0 0 S u c c e s s S e c r e t s
E m e r e o P t y L t d
3 D e l i v e r i n g t h e V a l u e o f B P M A c c e n t u r e
4 H a n d b o o k o n B P M 2 S p r i n g l e r
5 B P M : P r a c t i c a l G u i d e l i n e s f o r
S u c c e s s f u l I m p l e m e n t a t i o n
B H
6 B u s i n e s s P r o c e s s M a n a g e m e n t
D e m y s t i fi e d : A T u t o r i a l o n
M o d e l s
E d e n h o v e n U n i v e r s i t y o f
Te c h n o l o g y
