the+importance+of+business+processes

Why are Business Processes important?
There are some truths and sayings that stand the test of time. One I like is along the lines of: > //“if you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got”// In other words, when you are looking for a different outcome, think about what you do and change it. Too often we think about the detail. We look at the activity we are involved with and try to find a better way of being more efficient. We may indeed be more efficient if we keep the stapler on the right hand side of the desk, or arrange the furniture better. In the office world, the ‘what you do’ should be broader than the activity, the document, the technology. The organisation should focus on the sum of all these and how they flow together in **complete business processes.** Of-course the ‘different outcome’ we all crave is a business that is more efficient, drives down costs and improves customer service. A business process will therefore cut across the whole organisation and does not focus on the individual department. The ‘whole process’ must be looked at. Let’s for a moment look at the world of manufacturing: If the final sub-process is to move a car in to the paint shop and the paint shop can only handle 5 cars per day, there is little point in having 10 cars per day ready to be painted. This principle applies as much to case work in the office as it does to manufacturing. So what else can we do to improve efficiency if not the process? An organisation is built on the three pillars of People.

Having the right people, motivated and performing is naturally a key requirement to performance. Technology

Providing the people with the right tools to do their jobs well is also vitally important. Computer technology has revolutionised the office environment, and with web technologies and mobile computing we are all becoming much more efficient for longer. The third pillar is Process.

This is what holds it all together. The glue between the assets. Process goes right across the organisation. A Sales process may start with marketing and production (lets set the targets right!). It may involve accounts (lets get the price right). It will involve sales (close the deal). Then it will go back to accounts (let’s get the invoice right and paid on time). Production’s input may involve the supply chain. Therefore our sales process will not just involve accounts receivables but accounts payable too. I have heard that some processes “do not affect other parts of the company”. Whilst HR look after the employees across the organisation the question was asked whether their processes could be improved in isolation. I have worked with a number of HR departments, in manufacturing companies and large government organisations. Even in these HR processes, the whole organisation has been involved and affected. In a recent project we were looking at absence management. These processes, whilst being monitored and managed by the HR department, needed line management to provide the information for interactions with employees. The process ultimately required external agencies (Occupational health, NHS doctors and Pensions fund doctors) to process cases through to a conclusion. If this project had only looked internally at how the HR department operated, then the organisation would not have delivered an improved absence management process. -

[|effectiveness] and [|efficiency] while striving for [|innovation], flexibility, and integration with technology. BPM attempts to improve processes continuously. It can therefore be described as a "[|process optimization] process." It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach. An empirical study by Kohlbacher (2009) indicates that BPM helps organizations to gain higher[|customer satisfaction], [|product quality], delivery speed and [|time-to-market] speed.[|[][|2][[[|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_management#cite_note-SMS-1]|]]] [hide]
 * ==Contents==
 * [|1] [|Overview]
 * [|2] [|BPM life-cycle]
 * [|2.1] [|Design]
 * [|2.2] [|Modeling]
 * [|2.3] [|Execution]
 * [|2.4] [|Monitoring]
 * [|2.5] [|Optimization]
 * [|3] [|Practice]
 * [|3.1] [|BPM technology]
 * [|4] [|See also]
 * [|5] [|External links]
 * [|6] [|References] ||

[[|edit]] Overview
A [|business process] comprises a "series or network of value-added activities, performed by their relevant roles or collaborators, to purposefully achieve the common business goal."[|[][|3][[[|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_management#cite_note-2]|]]] These processes are critical to any organization: they may generate revenue and often represent a significant proportion of costs. As a managerial approach, BPM considers processes to be strategic assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and improved to deliver value added products and services to clients. This foundation is very similar to other [|Total Quality Management] or[|Continuous Improvement Process] methodologies or approaches. BPM goes a step further by stating that this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology to ensure the viability of the managerial approach in times of [|stress] and change. In fact, BPM is an approach to integrate a "change capability" to an organization - both human and technological. As such, many BPM articles and pundits often discuss BPM from one of two viewpoints: people and/or technology. Roughly speaking, the idea of (business) process is as traditional as concepts of [|tasks], [|department], [|production], [|outputs].[//[|citation needed]//] The currentmanagement and improvement approach, with formal definitions and technical modeling, has been around since the early 1990s (see [|business process modeling]). Note that in the [|IT] community, the term 'business process' is often used as synonymous of management of [|middleware] processes; or integrating [|application software]tasks. This viewpoint may be overly restrictive - a limitation to keep in mind when reading [|software engineering] [|papers] that refer to "business processes" or to "business process modeling". Although the initial focus of BPM was on the automation of business processes with the use of information technology, it has since been extended[//[|by whom?]//] to integrate human-driven processes in which human interaction takes place in series or parallel with the use of technology. For example (in [|workflow] systems), when individual steps in the business process require human intuition or judgment to be performed, these steps are assigned to appropriate members within the organization. More advanced forms such as [|human interaction management] are in the complex interaction between human workers in performing a workgroup task. In this case, many people and systems interact in structured, ad-hoc, and sometimes completely dynamic ways to complete one to many transactions. BPM can be used to understand organizations through expanded views that would not otherwise be available to organize and present. These views include the relationships of processes to each other which, when included in a process model, provide for advanced reporting and analysis that would not otherwise be available. BPM is regarded by some[//[|who?]//] as the backbone of [|enterprise content management]. Because BPM allows organizations to abstract business process from technology infrastructure, it goes far beyond automating business processes (software) or solving business problems (suite). BPM enables business to respond to changing consumer, market, and regulatory demands faster than competitors[//[|citation needed]//] - creating competitive advantage. As of 2010 technology has allowed the coupling of BPM to other methodologies, such as [|Six Sigma]. BPM tools allow users to: This brings with it the benefit of being able to simulate changes to business processes based on real-life data (not assumed knowledge). Also, the coupling of BPM to industry methodologies allows users to continually streamline and optimize the process to ensure that it is tuned to its market need.[|[][|4][[[|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_management#cite_note-3]|]]]
 * Define - baseline the process or the process improvement
 * Model - simulate the change to the process.
 * Analyze - compare the various simulations to determine an optimal improvement
 * Improve - select and implement the improvement
 * Control - deploy this implementation and by use of User defined dashboards monitor the improvement in real time and feed the performance information back into the simulation model in preparation for the next improvement iteration.

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