Business Process Management Tasks

Business Process ManagementBusiness Process Management Tasks

Business process management tasks can be grouped into five categories: design, modeling, execution, monitoring, and optimization.

Design

Process Design involves both the identification of existing processes and the design or recommendations of future processes. Areas of focus include representation of the work flow, the forces that act on it, interruptions, deadlines, procedures, service level agreements, and inputs and outputs.

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 your business.

Modeling

Modeling takes the theoretical design and introduces combinations of variables (e.g., changes in rent or materials costs, which determine how the process might operate under different circumstances).

It also involves running “what-if analysis” on the processes: “What if I have 75% of resources to do the same task?” “What if I want to do the same job for 80% of the current cost?”

We call this process the Staffing Model or Utilization Model, depending on its use.  A Staffing Model is more of a predicting tool for management, while a Utilization Model is more of a reporting tool after-the-fact, but depending it depends on your companies needs on how the models will be setup and used.

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. However, automating a process definition requires flexible and comprehensive infrastructure, which typically rules out implementing these systems in a legacy IT environment.

Monitoring

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, but it varies by industry and field.

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 BPMS.  Time studies can also depend on whether or not the business consultant is recording times as they are or as they should be – something your business would have to decide before beginning the monitoring process.

Optimization

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. Recommendations will be made that overall creates greater business value.

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