Business Process Management
Business Process Management, also abbreviated as BPM refers to the management approach, which is holistic with a focus on the alignment of all the aspects of a company or an organization as per the needs and wants of clients. While it does promote efficiency and effectiveness of the business, it also strives to be innovative, flexible and integrate with technology as it continuously tries to improve the processes. Thus, it can be termed as “process optimization” method. It is said that BPM helps an organization in becoming more effective, more efficient and relatively more capable for a change as compared to a the traditional approach of management which is functionally focused and hierarchical. Kohlbacher’s study in 2009, which could be termed as “empirical” says that BPM is helpful for organizations for higher quality of products, speed in delivery and in marketing and greater customer satisfaction. Another “empirical” study from Vera & Kuntz in 2007 across the Hospital sector in Germany, confirms that BPM leaves a positive impact over the efficiency of an organization.
Business Process encompasses a network or series of activities, which could be value-added and executed by the relevant collaborators or roles with the purpose of achieving the common goal in business. These business processes are of critical importance for any organization as they have the capability to generate revenue. Very often, they also represent a large proportion of expenses. BPM, with the managerial approach, considers processes as an organization’s strategic assets, which should be understood and managed to improve with the aim of delivering value added services and products to the clients. Such a foundation may be very similar with the approaches or methodologies in Continuous Improvement Process or Total Quality Management. However, BPM goes another step ahead suggesting that its approach could be enabled or supported through technology in order to ensure viability of managerial approach during stress and changing times. In fact, it would not be wrong to state that BPM’s approach integrates a company’s or an organization’s capability for change, in both human and technological way. Therefore, many pundits or articles about BPM discuss BPM across 2 viewpoints – technology and/or people. However, across the IT world, the terminology of business process is synonymous with management in middleware processes or in the integration of tasks in application software. Thus, this viewpoint could be very restrictive and thus, this limitation should be kept in mind while reading papers about software engineering, which could refer to terms like business processes or business process modeling.
BPM could be used for understanding an organization through a wider view, which would not be otherwise seen, like relationship between the processes. Once included in the model of the process, these relationships facilitate advanced analysis and reporting. Some regard BPM as the backbone in Enterprise Content Management, also abbreviated as ECM. Since BPM lets the organizations to extract business processes through the infrastructure of technology, it takes another leap apart from automating the business processes or help in solving problems in business.
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