BPM

Business Process Management (BPM) is an emerging field of knowledge and research at the intersection between management and information technology, encompassing methods, techniques and tools to design, enact, control, and analyze operational business processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information.[1] The term operational business processes refers to repetitive business processes performed by organizations in the context of their day-to-day operations, as opposed to strategic decision-making processes which are performed by the top-level management of an organization. BPM differs from business process reengineering, a management approach popular in the 1990s, in that it does not aim at one-off revolutionary changes to business processes, but at their continuous evolution. In addition, BPM usually combines management methods with information technology.
BPM covers activities performed by organizations to manage and, if necessary, to improve their business processes. While such a goal is hardly new, software tools called business process management systems (BPM systems) have made such activities faster and cheaper. BPM systems monitor the execution of the business processes so that managers can analyze and change processes in response to data, rather than just a hunch.
In short, Business Process Management is a management model that allows the organizations to manage their processes as any other assets and improve and manage them over the period of time. In a medium to large organization scenario, a good business process management system allows business to accommodate day to day changes in business processes due to competitive, regulatory or market challenges in business processes without overly relying IT departments. This strikes a fine balance between dynamic business areas that want to avoid every risk and grab every opportunity on their way through agile changes in their way to business but are very often restricted by a very stable and hard to change IT infrastructure.
Contents[hide]
1 Business Process Management Life-cycle
1.1 Process Design
1.2 Process Modeling
1.3 Process Execution
1.4 Process Monitoring
1.5 Process Optimization
2 Future developments
3 Business process management in practice
4 Bibliography
5 See also
6 Notes
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[edit] Business Process Management Life-cycle
The activities which constitute business process management can be grouped into five categories: Design, Modeling, Execution, Monitoring, Optimization.


[edit] Process Design
Process Design encompasses the following: 1. (optionally) The capture of existing processes and documenting their design in terms of Process Map / Flow, Actors, Alerts & Notifications, Escalations, Standard Operating Procedures, Service Level Agreements and task hand-over mechanisms 2. Design the "to-be" process covering all the above process and ensure that a correct and efficient design is theoretically prepared.
A real world analogy can be an "Architect Design" of a house.
Good design reduces the number of problems over the lifetime of the process. Changes to business processes, resulting from changes in the context that a business operates in are a current research area. A Business Process Management Software, ideally, is used to design, model, implement, monitor and optimize human to human, human to system, and system to system workflows which makes evolution of business processes more smooth and close to the regulatory, market, competitive and conformance challenges faced by businesses.

[edit] Process Modeling
Process Modeling encompasses taking the process design and introducing different cost, resource, and other constraint scenarios to determine how the process will operate under different circumstances.
It also involves running "what-if analysis" on the processes like what if I have 75% of resources to do the same task? or what if I want to optimize my process so I can do the same job in 80% of the original cost?
A real world analogy can be "wind-tunnel" test of an aeroplane or test flights to determine how much fuel it will consume and how many passengers it can carry.

[edit] Process Execution
The traditional way to automate processes is to develop or purchase an application that executes the required steps of the process. However, in practice, these applications rarely execute all the steps of the process accurately or completely. Another approach is to use a federation of software and human intervention. Due to the complexity of the federated approach, documenting a process is difficult. This makes changing or improving the process difficult.
As a response to these problems, software has been developed that enables the full business process (as developed in the process design activity) to be defined in a computer language which can be directly executed by the computer. The system will either use services in connected applications to perform business operations (e.g. calculating a repayment plan for a loan) or, when a step is too complex to automate, will message a human requesting input. Compared to either of the previous approaches, directly executing a process definition is much more straightforward and therefore easier to improve. However, automating a process definition requires flexible and comprehensive infrastructure which typically rules out implementing these systems in a legacy IT environment.
The commercial BPM software market has focused on graphical process model development, rather than text-language based process models, as a means to reduce the complexity of model development. Visual programming using graphical metaphors has increased productivity in a number of areas of computing and is well accepted by users.
Business rules have been used by systems to provide definitions for governing behavior, and a business rule engine can be used to drive process execution and resolution.

[edit] Process Monitoring
This monitoring encompasses the tracking of individual processes so that information on their state can be easily seen and the provision of statistics on the performance of one or more processes. An example of the tracking is being able to determine the state of a customer order (e.g. ordered arrived, awaiting delivery, invoice paid) so that problems in its operation can be identified and corrected. In addition, this information can be used to work with customers and suppliers to improve their connected processes. Examples of the statistics are the generation of measures on how quickly a customer order is processed, how many orders were processed in the last month etc.. These measures tend to fit into three categories: cycle time, defect rate and productivity.
The degree of monitoring depends on what information the business wants to evaluate and analyze and how business wants it to be monitored, in real-time or ad-hoc. Here, business activity monitoring (BAM) extend and expand the monitoring tools in BPMS.
Process mining is a collection of methods and tools related to process monitoring. The aim of process mining is to analyze event logs extracted through process monitoring and to compare them with an 'a priori' process model. Process mining allows process analysts to detect discrepancies between the actual process execution and the a priori model as well as to analyze bottlenecks.

[edit] Process Optimization
Process optimization includes retrieving process performance information from modeling or monitoring phase and identifying the potential or actual bottlenecks and potential rooms for cost savings or other improvements and then applying those enhancements in the design of the process thus continuing the value cycle of business process management

COP

Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. In a nutshell: