What is business process management

The world of Business process management can be a strange and disrupting one, full of acronyms like BPM, BPMN, BPMS, SOA, etc. If you’re not careful you can find yourself getting lost in terms such as As-Is, To-Be, Processes, and Activities.

Not to worry though, we will present you with some of the most important pieces of BPM jargon. That’ll have you speaking the same language as your BPM experts in no time!

Here’s a list of some important terms:

• Business Process Management
• Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN)
• Process Mapping
• As-Is Process
• To-Be Process
• Business Process Improvement

Business Process Management or Business Process Management approach, both leading to the BPM acronym, is used all the time in the business slang. But what do they actually mean?

“Business process management (BPM) is a field in operations management that focuses on improving corporate performance by managing and optimizing a company’s business processes.”

Theodore Panagacos. The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Management: Everything You Need to Know and How to Apply It to Your Organization.

“The discipline of managing processes (rather than tasks) as the means for improving business performance outcomes and operational agility. Processes span organizational boundaries, linking together people, information flows, systems and other assets to create and deliver value to customers and constituents.” Gartner.

That explains it all. Еxcept not in plain English. So let’s break it down.

What is a Business?

In the term Business Process Management, ‘Business’ in fact widely means organization. This could be a charity, a university, a mutual society, a college of further education, a standard for-profit business. Any organized group of people with a particular purpose and with the expectation that the organization is set up to add value in some way.

What is a Process?

The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) defines the word ‘process’ as “a set of interrelated or interacting activities that transforms inputs into outputs.” Perhaps a simpler way of putting this is to say, a process is a series of actions taken in order to achieve a particular end. The ’transformation’ is the key word in ISO’s definition. However, anything we do that produces something is a process. Generally, inputs to a process are outputs of other processes.

What is a Management?

‘Management’ means dealing with or controlling things or people.

Hence, Business Process Management is something that is done to control the actions or steps taken in the course of producing something (product or service), in order to improve the value added by doing those actions.

Putting this three word together into the term Business Process Management also adds into the meaning an end objective: Improvement!

Delivering Improvement

Improvement must be the key objective and deliverable of any BPM project. Achieving improvement is the singular reason for undertaking a BPM project. Nevertheless, that improvement can take many forms. For example improved access to information about how to do a process, a better quality end product, more efficient production. Generally, the power to know and understand your business.

How to do Business Process Management

There is no one way. However, considering that BPM is about process improvement, it is a requirement that the start point is documenting your processes. This will help you to understand what they are, how they interrelated, who is responsible for doing what.

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN)

The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) provides a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a Business Process Diagram. Its goal is to support Business Process Modeling by providing a standard notation that is comprehensible to business users yet represents complex process semantics for technical users. BPMN was created by the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) and has gone through several revisions. It is currently maintained and supported by the Object Management Group (OMG). BPMN provides a common notation that is easily understandable by management, analysts, developers, stakeholders.

Process Mapping

The most common approach to documenting your processes is the Process Mapping.

Process mapping is a piece of work to identify all the steps and decisions in a process in diagrammatic form.  The analysis team needs to model and examine several aspects of the current (AS-IS) value chain under study in a process improvement project. The main goal of the analysis is to create a visual diagram of the value chain along with its associated text and metrics. Next step is to determine if there are possible areas of improvement (e.g., reductions in cost or time, remove recurring activities).  The team designs a modified value chain model (TO-BE) with the improvements and then handlес a gap analysis on how to transition to the new value chain.

“As Is” Process

An “As Is” business process defines the current state of the business process in an organization. Usually, the analysis goal in putting together the current state process is to clarify exactly how the business process works today.

“To-Be” Process

A “To Be” business process defines the future state of a business process in an organization. The analysis goal in putting together the future state process is to clarify how the business process will work after the changes. Those changes could be technology or business process changes.

“As Is” and “To Be” business processes contain all of the objects in a typical business process model – description, list of roles, list of steps and exceptions.

Business Process Improvement (BPI)

Business Process Improvement (BPI) is a strategic planning methodology helping organizations to redesign their “As Is” business processes to accomplish improvement. Effective BPI helps to generate encouraging results in operational efficiency and customer focus. When implemented by means of a structured methodology, BPI helps companies to decrease their operational costs and cycle time. Also to identified employee skills that need improvement, to encourage smoother procedures and improve the quality of the products. In short, BPI brings the organizations more efficient workflow and overall significant business growth.