Business Process Management

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Business Process Management (BPM) is a field of knowledge 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 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.

Contents

[edit] Business process management activities

The activities which constitute business process management can be grouped into three categories: design, execution and monitoring.

[edit] Process design

Process design encompasses the design and capture of existing business processes, as well as the simulation of new ones. The software used to do this includes graphical editors that document processes, repositories that store process models, and business process simulation tools to run a process a large number of times in order to measure performance parameters such as average time and cost.

Good design reduces the number of problems over the lifetime of the system. Changes to business processes, resulting from changes in the context that a business operates in, are a current research area. The integration of software used to create graphical representations of workflows, as well as to implement and maintain these workflows makes evolution of business processes less stressful.

[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] Future developments

Although the initial focus of BPM was on the automation of mechanistic business processes, this has since been extended to integrate human-driven processes in which human interaction takes place in series or parallel with the mechanistic processes. A common form is where individual steps in the business process which require human intuition or judgment to be performed are assigned to the appropriate members of an organization (as with workflow systems). More advanced forms are in supporting the complex interaction between human workers in performing a workgroup task. In the latter case an emerging class of BPM software known as the human interaction management is used to support and monitor these processes as well as to permit their ongoing redefinition at runtime.

BPMS can be used to understand organizations through expanded views that would not otherwise be available to organize and present. These views include the relationships of processes to each other which, when included in the process model, provide for advanced reporting and analysis that would not otherwise be available. BPM is regarded to be the crucial backbone of enterprise content management.

Not all activities can be effectively modeled and some processes are best left alone. The value in BPMS is not in automating very simple or very complex tasks, it is in modeling processes where there is the most opportunity.

[edit] Business process management in practice

In practice, organizations often start a BPM project or program with the objective to optimize an area which has been identified as an area for improvement. The current practice is to start by undertaking a business process mapping (or Business process modeling) phase using a technique/notation such as IDEF, BPWIN or BPMN.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Sandeep Arora "Business Process Management. Process is the Enterprise" ISBN 1-4116-3117-X
  • Jörg Becker, Martin Kugeler, Michael Rosemann (Eds.) "Process Management" ISBN 3-540-43499-2
  • Roger Burlton Business Process Management: Profiting From Process. ISBN 0-672-32063-0
  • James F. Chang "Business Process Management Systems" ISBN 0-8493-2310-X
  • Michael Harvey "Essential Business Process Modelling" ISBN 0-596-00843-0
  • Debevoise, Neilson T (2005). Business Process Management with a Business Rules Approach. Business Knowledge Architects. ISBN 0-9769048-0-2. 
  • Marlon Dumas, Wil van der Aalst, Arthur ter Hofstede (Eds) Process-Aware Information Systems, Wiley, ISBN 0-471-66306-9
  • Keith Harrison-Broninski "Human Interactions: The Heart and Soul of Business Process Management" ISBN 0-929652-44-4
  • John Jeston and Johan Nelis "Business Process Management: Practical Guidelines to Successful Implementations" ISBN 0-7506-6921-7
  • Martyn Ould "Business Process Management: A Rigorous Approach" ISBN 1-902505-60-3 North America ISBN 0-929652-27-4
  • Terry Schurter, Steve Towers. "Customer Expectation Management: Success Without Exception". ISBN 0-929652-07-X
  • Howard Smith, Peter Fingar. Business Process Management: The Third Wave. ISBN 0-929652-33-9 (hardcover) ISBN 0-929652-34-7 (paperback)
  • Steve Towers, Peter Fingar - Business Process Management Group, "In Search Of BPM Excellence: Straight From The Thought Leaders". ISBN 0-929652-40-1
  • Peter Fingar. "Extreme Competition: Innovation And The Great 21st Century Business Reformation".

ISBN 0-929652-38-2

  • Howard Smith, Peter Fingar."IT Doesn't Matter: Business Processes Do". ISBN 0-929652-35-1
  • Michael Hugos. "The Greatest Innovation Since the Assembly Line: Powerful Strategies for Business Agility". ISBN 0-929652-39-9
  • Andrew Spanyi. "More for Less: The Power of Process Management". ISBN 0-929652-03-0
  • Andrew Spanyi. "Business Process Management Is a Team Sport: Play It to Win!". ISBN 0-929652-02-3
  • Kiran.K.Garimella. "The Power of Process: Unleashing the Source of Competitive Advantage". ISBN 0-929652-06-1
  • Peter Fingar, Joseph Bellini. "The Real Time Enterprise: Competing on Time With the Revolutionary Business Strategy-Execution Machine". ISBN 0-929652-30-4

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Standards

A number of technical standards have been specified for business process management, notable among them are:

  • BPMN is a notation for diagramming business processes.
  • BPEL4WS are process description languages which can be directly executed by a business process management system.
  • BPML was a proposed language, but now the BPMI has dropped support for this in favor of BPEL4WS.
  • WS-BPEL the next version of BPEL4WS.
  • XPDL is a standard for exchanging process design between process modelling tools.
  • Wf-XMLis a standard protocol used to integrate process engines and provide for their interaction.
  • WS-CDL is a process contract language used to capture the global behavior of independent processes.

[edit] Journals and Conference Series

A listing of journals and conference series dedicated to Business Process Management:

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ van der Aalst, W.M.P., ter Hofstede, A.H.M. and Weske, M.: "Business Process Management: A Survey", in Business Process Management, Proceedings of the First International Conference. Springer Verlag, 2003.
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