What is Business Process Management

We define Business Process Management (BPM) as a management discipline that combines methods, tools and technologies to model, simulate, analyse, design, monitor and control business processes with a main goal improving their performance.

To understand this more clearly, think of a process in your organization. You have some inputs, which you transform to generate outputs that yield value to your company. If you examine the process closely, each activity should be done competently and be essential for the process to run. You would also like to see that the work flows efficiently and that there are no bottlenecks delaying the results.

In order to really know how your process is behaving, you should establish Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) to measure its performance. You should also identify what goals are important to your organization, as well as how your business strategies, policies and decisions impact your process, and whether your key performance measures are aligned with them.

You also need to analyse all stakeholders involved (anyone that impacts or is impacted by the process). This must be done in order to define how they relate to the activities, inputs and outputs and how changes could affect them. It is also important to study the interaction between the individual activities, the process as a whole and the customer, making sure every step of the process provides real value.

Additionally, it is important to define the adequacy of the software applications and all the elements supporting your processes. You need to evaluate how easy it is for your employees to interact with these elements and whether, at the end of the day, they are really helping them to get things done in the most efficient way.

The final goal of BPM is to give you the tools to lead and manage change so you can continuously improve your processes. You can relate BPM to the PDCA (Plan Do Check Act) management approach by Dr. Shewhart, or the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control) cycle in the Six Sigma methodology. The BPM methodology can be applied to any process in any type of organization.

In this rapid changing world, every day new competitors are entering the market with innovative business models, better and more affordable products and services, and – in order to stay competitive – you need to get ahead of these changes.  Through BPM, all stakeholders participate in the improvement process in order to increase efficiency and to obtain the highest possible value to your customers.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.