Features

Business Process Management Gaining Ground

By Priya George

The Business Process Report 2006 reveals that the concept of business process management has become indispensable at mid-size and large companies. 80 percent of the companies surveyed are committed to the concept of business process management. Compared with previous years, the proportion of companies that are deeply involved with the concept has even hit a record high of 55 percent…

In a world that gives importance to holistic development, the concept of Business Process Management (BPM) is gaining ground. A recent BPM study, Business Process Report 2006, reveals the importance of BPM and tools. According to the study:

80% of the companies surveyed are committed to the concept of BPM
The important issues that companies face include cost reduction, improving effectiveness and innovation
The objectives of BPM are cost reduction and optimization to enhance performance

The study revealed that companies recognize the need and potential for improvement in terms of performance of business process organization as a whole. It also revealed that individual departments in organization were rated better than the entire organization.

BPM in a nutshell:

Closes the gap between business and IT
Enables flexible, model driven process design implementation, execution and support within and across business applications
Allows companies to model processes catering for different process views and user roles, optimizing the communication between the business owner and IT
Provides the procedure, methodology, technology and business content to enable the adaptive business
Provides transparency and process re-usability
Offers process control providing monitoring and analysis capabilities for continuous process improvement
Offers process oriented testing and documentation

Business process management activities
The activities, which constitute business process management, can be grouped into three categories. They include:

Process design: it encompasses either the design or capture of existing processes. In addition the processes may be simulated in order to test them. The software support for these activities consists of graphical editors to document the processes and repositories to store the process models.
Process execution: the traditional way to achieve the automatic execution of processes is that an application is developed or purchased which executes the steps required.
Process monitoring: it encompasses the tracking of individual process so that information on their state can be easily seen and the provision of statistics on the performance of one or more processes.

92 percent of the companies surveyed consider support from management for BPM to be important or critical. BPM is therefore clearly defined as a management task.

"The study very clearly shows the demand for a reliable manager for processes and process management, a 'Chief Process Officer', who has central responsibility and is able to make decisions concerning BPM. These results make it clear that the concept of business process management is already instilled in people's minds as a management task; what is still lacking in some companies is the practical implementation," said Helmut Kruppke, CEO of IDS Scheer AG. Helmut Kruppke was speaking at the ARIS Process Day, which saw Simon Dale (VP and CTO of SAP AP), Clive Tilbrook (GM Business Development of Software AG, Asia), HongYea Chee (technical director AP of ILOG) and Evelyn Kaupp (Manager Strattegy & process management of Siemens) and other attendees all stressing on the importance of BPM.
The process reality in many companies today is as follows:

Process Design & Modeling
Business owner and IT expert do not speak the same language, do not share the same concepts of processes or use the same tools
Plethora of tools without linkage of views & objects
Project time lost due to internal alignment needs – projects running out of budget

Process Configuration
Disruption between business logic and technical implementation – missing methodology
No navigation from model to process configuration
Missing transparency & documentation
No re-use of process knowledge

Process Integration
Hard-coded cross-component integration with a patchwork of solutions for A2A, B2B and industry specific processes
No common process repository
Missing process management and control across applications and enterprise boundaries

The advantages of implementing BPM solutions in an organisation, such as that provided by SAP Netweaver, show that the ability to change can result in increased growth:

Closes the gap: links business and IT
Drives business: enables flexible, model-driven process design, implementation, execution, and support within and across business applications
Eases modeling: process modeling for different process views and user roles
Enables adaptiveness: provides procedure, methodology, technology, and business content to increase flexibility
Increases visibility: provides transparency, process re-usability as well as monitoring, analysis, testing and documentation capabilities

Figure1: Unified Business Process Management [Courtesy: SAP]


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