Business Process Management: Driving Efficiencies and Competitiveness

Competitive threat and an increasingly complex business environment have been creating new challenges for enterprises. Speed becomes a big issue, how do they gather and evaluate information rapidly, and how do they use that information to respond to business events rapidly and appropriately. Speed becomes a competitive advantage.

Too often, enterprises failed to respond to emerged business challenges. Examples are: enterprises too slow to detect new business opportunities and moves by competitors; moreover enterprises are always reactive and can't predict problems early.

To address this challenge, enterprise leaders really need a solution that enables them to see their business comprehensively and in real-time. They can incorporate technology to increase efficiency, enhance business responsiveness, and ultimately yield competitive advantages.

In several last years, many enterprises used information technology to optimize their business processes, but they developed it in several separate systems. Their systems were separated per work unit or per business process. It will definitely cause some problems when encountering a business process that need collaboration or exchange information to fulfill the process.

Business Process Management (BPM) technology is the answer that really needed in a challenging business environment. BPM is a new approach to increase efficiency and enhance business competitiveness. BPM is designed to combine people and information system through flexible and automated processes. BPM can also drastically increase the responsiveness of an enterprise to the needs of its customer by giving information access in real-time to identify problems, and take some actions to respond to the problems more quickly.

BPM Defined

What is BPM? And why is it become an important element to a successful enterprise? Business processes are the core of all over activities in an enterprise. To achieve goals, business processes will align all resources. Each business has unique process, in accordance with characteristics of an enterprise, whether creating a new product or service, procuring supplies, answering customer inquiries, or recruiting new employees.

Effective and efficient Business Process Management can yield competitive advantages to enterprises. Managed business processes create opportunities. However enterprises sometimes don't understand or control their business processes. Management might have created a procedure of an ideal business process, but the reality of the execution may be different. Implementation of a business process often leads toward redundancy, inefficiencies, stagnations, and errors. Business without agile control over their business processes often hinder enterprises to achieve goals.

Business Process Management (BPM) is an approach to increase effectiveness and efficiency through development of automated processes and agility for managing changes. BPM enables enterprises to see and control all business process elements, such as applications, employees, customer, supplier, and workflow. BPM improve business processes by creating better feedback mechanism. Continuous and real-time reviews help identify and eliminate problems more quickly before they grow.

A Business Process Management (BPM) solution has four main components:

• Modeling
  User can define or design the structured definition of each business process graphically. The Process Manager can design a process and all needed process elements, rules, sub-processes, parallel processes, exception handling, error handling, and workflows with no programming skills and no help from IT staff.
• Integrating
  BPM can connect process elements so they can exchange information to achieve goals. In application level, this means using Application Program Interfaces (API) and messaging. For users, this means creating a workspace on the computer desktop or wireless device to do their task and role in a business process.
• Monitoring
  Users can control the performance of their current processes and the performance of personnel who are executing these processes. User can see processes in progress, completed processes, and defined metrics.
• Optimizing
  Users can analyze and monitor a business process, to look for inefficiencies, and it enables users to take actions quickly and to change the process to improve efficiency.

BPM Advantages

In fact, what will be obtained by an enterprise that undertakes a BPM solution to manage and optimize their business processes? Business Process Management (BPM) solution advantages are:

• The BPM solution will facilitate enterprise to model their business process, automate their execution, monitor the health of the process, and make it easy to change business processes to improve the performance.
• BPM software enables enterprises to automate the tasks that are currently being performed manually. A BPM solution can automate approval or rejection process, notification and status report.
• With BPM an enterprise can generate the seamless integration among the various systems that the process crosses.
• BPM help enterprises to create exception handling and alternative processes. Strong exception-handling capabilities are needed to cope with the dynamic nature of business. Automating exceptions and special handling will improve productivity and reduced costs.
• BPM can enhance business responsiveness through the ability to obtain information rapidly and real-time.
• BPM reduces the time elapsed in a business process.
• BPM Increases the productivity per employee.
• A Business Process needs many people and resources. A good BPM should reduce the number of resources needed for the same process.

Summary

Many enterprises used information technology to optimize their business processes, but they have developed it in several separate systems, either separated per work unit or per business process. It will cause obstacles when encountering business process that need collaboration to complete the process. Business Process Management (BPM) is the solution needed by enterprises to manage their business processes, model and modify them as needed for optimizing, reduce its production cost, increase its employee efficiency, improve customer satisfaction, and refine relationship with its business partners.