In today’s global environment there are extreme competitive pressures – technology, regulatory, environmental in nature, together with the challenges of new competition.
To succeed in this scenario, Business Process Management (BPM) is emerging as the best way for an organization to achieve responsiveness, increase its ability to meet changing demands and improve efficiency by doing things better and faster.
BPM combines a process design approach and supporting technology that can transform an organization’s performance.
There are four key stages in BPM:
- Analysis and mapping of the current and future business processes
- Automation of those processes
- Performance monitoring
- Continuous optimization
Process Design
This stage aims to streamline key processes by eliminating waste and improving lead times. Through process design, BPM helps to reduce human dependence, it builds scalability and delivers business continuity.
The well-designed processes help you with resource efficiency, cost reduction, enhanced profitability, increased employee and customer satisfaction.
Automation
Although there has been a lot of investment in automation, this alone will not solve the problem. IT spending has to be coupled with resources on intangible assets like process orientation, business processes, organization structuring, etc., to achieve process excellence.
Once processes are streamlined, automation significantly helps by improving processing times by automating manual transactions, reduces human error, results in stronger process adherence and offers transparency and real time visibility. Automation also allows for robust MIS, scalability and improved business continuity.
Performance Monitoring
It is very important not to walk away from the changes made, and closely monitor them to understand any impact. It is necessary to interact with all stakeholders to understand how the they are impacted and how this can be improved further. The key benefit of automation is the ability to better manage MIS platforms. Discrete data points can now converge into meaningful information giving you the a certain level of predictability that is so critical to long term success.
Continuous Optimization
The only way an organization can succeed with continuously changing market forces is to constantly look at improving efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility. This is not a management process, but all members of your team have to understand that they need to constantly reflect on what they are doing and try to do things better. |
