A Beginner’s Guide to implement and use well a BPM-application
The true measure of success in commerce is growth — and the building blocks to achieve a solid foundation are critical. Speed, flexibility, intelligence, global scale, and comprehensive commerce experience are necessary for business success. As customer expectations change, companies are challenged with adapting to remain competitive. That’s why in the last decade, companies from all over the world, started to implement BPM software to monitor and manage their business core activities: a BPMS provides benefits to organizations in many different ways, helps organizations to reduce process time, improves regulatory compliance and efficiencies across organizational boundaries such as departments, branches and trading partners (including both supply chain and outsourcing).
BPM software enables businesses to design, implement, execute, monitor, and optimize important business processes. By doing so, companies can efficiently organize and analyze data in order to automate business operations to save time and improve overall business productivity. Besides the obvious benefits of implementing BPM software — like reducing costs, rendering competitive benefits, and enhancing business agility — these systems can do much more for your business and business strategy. BPMS seems the perfect tool for your company, but all that glitters is not gold: BPMS projects fail at a rate higher than tolerable because this kind of projects, being fundamentally different than all other IT projects, are not yet sufficiently supported culturally, organizationally, and economically. In particular, a BPM project puts pressure on business executives for detailed process leadership, management, and governance.
There are many factors behind the failure of a project. The technology being used may not be as up-to-date or relevant as it should be. It may also be due to environmental, cultural, or readiness factors. More often than not though, failure is caused by an overriding issue–not selecting the right project first. Without a good starting point, the whole thing may have been doomed before work even began. That’s why we’re listing here some useful steps to help your business to implement and use well a BPMS: just follow the path “Analyze > Design > Model > Test > Monitor > Optimize”
Step 1: Analyze
Start from the big picture: what are your core business processes? Are they tracked or not? Remind that developing business processes “top-down”, is not the answer: given the complexities of business process, successful businesses will have to develop processes “organically”, you have to look at every aspect of your company, follow a bottom-up approach when you’re trying to implement a BMPS solution is a useful game-changer for you company
Step 2: Design
Most processes include some steps to collect data and a workflow to process them. Build your process and identify who will own each task in the workflow. Examine the process that needs to be streamlined and understand the factors that should be considered when creating a process’ workflow.
Step 3: Model
Represent the process in a visual layout. Fix details like deadlines and conditions to give a clear idea of the sequence of events, and the flow of data through the process. Create a specific workflow for the specific process. Make sure to specify all conditions to be met in the software requirements, model your processes using a diagram to visualize how they work.
Step 4: Test
Execute the process by testing it live with a small group first and then open it up to all users. Make sure you restrict access to sensitive information and introduce the people involved in the process of the new BPMS-driven approach.
Step 5: Monitor
Keep an eye on the process as it runs through the workflow. Use the right metrics to identify progress, measure efficiency, and locate bottlenecks. Measure the time and quantity of work done using Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), to draw objective conclusions about where and what to improve.
Step 6: Optimize
Constantly introduce improvements: process monitoring data is analyzed to determine how well the process performs in real business conditions. The processes are continually improved as you analyze them: notice any changes that need to be done to your workflows to make them more efficient.
Conclusion
Developing a business case for the first BPMs initiative isn’t easy and will be the most time-consuming and the most important because it will include the evaluation, selection, and justification of a BPM software suite to support the implementation. It will also serve as the first proof-point for BPMs in your organization, that's why is it so important to implement well your project. To ensure success, follow the advice outlined in this article, the result will be a strong business case and a set of valuable metrics to monitor and measure results during the implementation. From that point on, you will have a repeatable approach, a solid technology foundation on which to build, and a set of benefits and benchmark ROI numbers to make justifying future BPM initiatives a breeze — putting you on the fast path to realizing continuous process improvement and strategic business value from a BPMS.
BPMS are big and complex tools: they incorporate analysis of business processes, automation, optimization, workflow design, and business strategy. Understanding how a BPMS works and devising a plan beforehand is essential to successful BPMS implementation, but once it’s been properly implemented the benefits can be tremendous: the sooner you start, the better you will perform.
