Business Process Management Software Programs -FAQ

What is Business Process Management?

Business process management (BPM) is a management approach focused on aligning all aspects of an organization with the requirements and needs of clients. By viewing processes in this manner, it is easy to identify areas of improvement. BPM activities seek to make business processes more effective, more efficient and more capable of adapting to an ever-changing environment. It is a holistic management approach that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. It could therefore be described as a "process optimization process."

Many companies have business processes that are unique to its business model. Since these processes tend to evolve over time as the business reacts to market conditions, the BPM solution you choose must be easily adaptable to the new conditions and requirements and continue to be a perfect fit for the company.

In order to use BPM effectively, organizations must stop focusing exclusively on data and data management, and adopt a process-oriented approach that makes no distinction between work done by a human and a computer.

The idea of BPM is to bring processes, people and information together.
Dynamic infrastructure requires separation of flows, business rules and services.
Identifying the business processes is relatively easy. Breaking down the barriers between business areas, and finding owners for the processes is difficult.

BPM not only involves managing business processes within the enterprise but also involves real-time integration of the processes of a company with those of its suppliers, business partners, and customers. BPM involves looking at automation horizontally instead of vertically.

How Does Business Process Software Help?

Business process management (BPM) software helps achieve these goals by providing the tools to model, automate, and optimize processes for faster time to market, increased customer satisfaction, higher productivity, and reduced costs.

What Are The Benefits Of Using BPM Software To Facilitate Business Process Management?

Financial Benefits of Business Process Management

• Creates additional/new revenue
• Creates cost savings through tax avoidance
• Enables cost avoidance
• Faster return on investments
• Increases cash flow
• Increases profitability of existing products/services
• Increases revenue of existing sources
• Increases stock price/shareholder value
• Lowers cost of production
• Lowers cost of servicing

Organizational Benefits of Business Process Management

• Builds company reputation
• Creates new customer opportunities
• Fosters company vision and mission
• Improves market position relative to competitors
• Improves the ability to serve customers
• Increases competitiveness and ability to charge a premium

Operational Benefits of Business Process Management

• Decreases employee work loads for undesirable work
• Elminates non-value added activities
• Improves employee morale / team spirit
• Improves internal communication between departments and groups
• Improves use of workspace
• Increases employee and process productivity
• Reduces cycle time
• Reduces cycle time of production/process
• Reduces external inputs to processes
• Reduces person-hours
• Reduces process steps
• Simplifies processes and workflow steps

Information Technology Benefits of Business Process Management

• Decreases maintenance/support costs
• Enables service level agreement (SLA) obligations
• Improves application/system performance
• Improves application/system utilization rate
• Increases efficiency of support activities
• Increases productivity through automation
• Maintains intellectual property investment
• Preserves value of technology
• Reduces application/system variation (increases reliability)
• Reduces paper documentation requirements
• Strengthens application/system security

What Are Some Of The Risks In Buying Business Process Management Software?

Method relates to a lack of understanding or misuse of methods in the planning, design, implementation, enactment, evaluation phase. Risks include:

• Invalid process analysis/design methods
• Invalid mapping methods (problem to solution, solution to implementation)
• Invalid process modeling methods
• Invalid process implementation methods
• Invalid evaluation methods
• Inconsistency of evaluation/measurement methods
• Invalid feedback mechanism

Communication relates to - lack of communication among BPM stakeholders and participants. This includes conversations, meeting, training, reporting, and communication in all other forms. Risks include:

• Miscommunication of goals
• Lack of communication between stakeholders

Information relates - the absence of information efficiency, effectiveness, security, flexibility for both transfers between lifecycle phases and process

• monitoring and controlling efforts.
• Misusage of information
• Inadequate information
• Invalid information
• Invalid information conversion

System / Technology -relates to the failure of system/technology implementation due to the system/technology’s nature or through improper human interference. Risks include:

• Lacking technology acceptance
• Misusage of technology
• Lack of technology flexibility
• Lack of technology compatibility
• Lack of technology scalability

Leadership / Management - relates to failure to display strong leadership and/or proper project management. Risks include:

• Lack of leadership/management
• Inconsistency of leadership/management
• Absence of leadership/management

Resource / Skill - relates to lack of desired resource/skill sets or the misuse of resources/skills. Risks include:

• Absence of resource/skill
• Misusage of resource/skill
• Inability to use resource/skill

Adaptation of Change - relates to the inability to manage/perform changes. Risks include:

• Failure to redesign jobs/functions
• Failure to perform necessary changes
• Inability to recognize problems
• Inability to react to designated changes

Strategic Thinking - relates to Failure to define vision, goals, functions of all BPM stakeholders, participants, and components involved. Risks include:

• Inaccurate strategic definition
• Unclear strategic definition
• Absence of strategic definition

Other risks include:

Time to Value – According to recent research, the industry average for installing new applications is 14.5 months – and 36% of the projects are delivered late6. When compared against the data for BPM installations, many BPM deployments would have three or four versions of a process deployed in that time, each generating significant business value. Additionally, most applications require organizations to start with their core data model and base functionality. A great amount of time could be spent implementing capabilities that are not directly relevant to your process problem, but are required for the proper execution of the application. There are no such start-up costs for working with BPM.

Risk of Adoption – Users often resist having to learn an entirely new application. Worse still, if the capabilities do not match the users’ needs, then the application will not be used and process efficiency will get worse, not better. In contrast, leading BPM solutions can bring process into the tools that users are familiar with today – like Microsoft Outlook. This virtually eliminates training and adoption hurdles. Furthermore, BPM allows project teams to focus on the specific capabilities needed by participants in the process – and no more. No time is lost identifying which application capabilities will not be used or need to be customized.

Responding to Change – Once the application has been installed, organizations are
often faced with difficulties keeping the application synchronized with the changing
priorities of the business processes. Applications are not designed to accommodate
frequent change; they are focused on standardizing actions and processes. In fact,
customizing a standard application often introduces additional problems and costs, as discussed in the next section.

Expanding Scope – Process improvement requirements can come from all parts of the organization. While the first problem might be in on-boarding new employees, the next could be in managing shipment logistics. Buying specific applications for each of these process problems would not be practical. In contrast, a BPM suite can be used to improve any process.

What Are Some Good Open Source Business Process Management Software?

There are many BPM / Workflow solutions out there. The following are five open source BPM / Workflow solutions for you to evaluate before trying the proprietary ones.

http://www.intalio.com/

http://www.processmaker.com/

http://www.bonitasoft.com/products/BPM__workflow_overview.php

http://www.uengine.org/web/uEngineEN

http://www.cuteflow.org/index.html

What Are Some Good Proprietary Business Process Management Software?

The category of business process management (BPM) software covers a lot of ground: As you choose tools, beware of the jargon, and focus on the business problem you’re trying to solve. Analysis and modeling tools help enterprises map out their existing processes and optimize them. Modeling and management tools, often used in concert with a business rules engine, help enterprises test and deploy software that implements processes—either within a BPM application that manages an entire process (such as document management) or as an automation tool that interacts with other applications and data sources to run a set of processes (like a very sophisticated scripting tool).

http://www.appian.com/

http://www.global360.com/

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/info/bpm/

http://www.lombardisoftware.com/

http://www.metastorm.com/

http://www.pega.com/

http://www.savvion.com/

http://www.softwareag.com/Corporate/products/wm/bpm/default.asp

http://www.tibco.com/solutions/bpm/default.jsp

What are Important Features Of Business Process Management Software?

• Design - Business process analysis, discovery, decomposition
• Ease of Use - Navigation, UI intuitiveness, graphical views
• Automation - Transaction, application, Web services management
• Analysis and Optimization - Business model simulation, aggregation, optimization
• Report Generation and Document Management - Built-in Web publishing, report distribution
• Repository Options - Process model repository, built-in version control, team collaboration
• Human Workflow - Workflow portal, user interface, organizational management
• Monitoring and Management - Queries, alerts, real-time management and monitoring
• Product Architecture - OS, application and database platform, standards compliance, footprint, customizable workflow
• Integration. ability of BPM system software to connect to extenal applications and systems.

• Organization Structure. The organization structure of the company. This shows the users in each of the company's departments, roles and groups

What Factors Should be Considered Before Implementing Business Process Management Software?

The best software in the world cannot magically transform your company. BPM is about first understanding the concept and then ruthlessly examining all parts of your business processes, right down to the fingernail shavings, in order to make them as efficient as possible. Software does have a role to play, but the point is, look at the job first, find out what you need, and then shop for software that can help you get it done.

Analysis
First and foremost, the process of BPM analysis must not be rushed. A rushed job leads to a weak foundation, since examination of your current, or extant, process is the basis from which all improvements will spring. The flipside of this is “paralysis by analysis,” whereby you cannot stop analyzing the process and start taking action. Business analysts come with many different skills, but one of them must be knowing when “enough is enough” for a successful BPM effort.

The other great requirement is interpersonal skill, since so many of the problems – and solutions – will come from people already employed and working under the current processes. Analysts must invariably deal with thorny internal politics and large egos, and a major cause of BPM project failures is when they find their access and analysis blocked.

Boundaries and scope
You should begin the project by mapping your current business processes, the so called “as-is” situation, with a thorough, highlevel overview that will enable you to recognize and then zoom in on the area most in need of improvement. This sometimes can be done by mapping the processes with a relatively simple flowchart, where straightforward bottlenecks can be identified. With the use of simple tools and a high-level description, the business analyst should be able to establish clear boundaries on what part of the total process will need to be improved.

Stepping back
A high-level “as-is” description will also make it easier to prevent sub-optimization. When looking at process improvement, it can be easy to improve an area within the boundaries of the scope. Every process is part of a larger chain of processes, however, and optimizing one part can actually lead to problems with another part. It is therefore important to regularly step back and look at the bigger picture again and get a handle on how all the pieces fit – or do not fit – together.

The big-picture overview can also be used as a starting point for the next phase of a project. This can speed up the new process, even though some checks may still be needed to validate the information.

Mapping the human element
Most BPM methodologies have their background in the manufacturing industry. Many of these processes involve robots and machines, which are great at repeating fixed steps. But in both manufacturing and in the service industries, there are also humans involved. Because of this, it is important to map the human element as well.

This can be done with Role Activity Diagrams (RAD). Simple versions are sometimes made using flowcharts with so-called “swim lanes” that divide the flowchart into different roles. More complex models can be created by using RAD-specific symbols and concepts. These diagrams map how the different sub-processes take place between the different roles, what decisions are made, and whether the process even changes.

RAD diagrams can help you better understand many of the processes taking place, especially in service organizations, which have not been the traditional focus of BPM studies, but where many of the same optimizing techniques can be used.

Culture and continuous improvement cycles
Culture is a key element in a successful BPM implementation at any type of organization. The willingness to participate in both the

analysis and the actual execution is, for example, determined by how the organization views the management and project team on items such as trust, vision, and respect.

Will the employees suggest changes for improving the total process, or will they tell you that some of their work is actually redundant? This will depend on the status that is given to process improvement. Are people rewarded for making suggestions? Or, on an even more basic level, do they even get heard when they make suggestions?

Employees are one of the best sources of information and improvement, since they’re involved in the everyday processes that are being analyzed. Making them aware of the benefits of improving BPM can provide one of the longest-lasting successes of an implementation.

Governance
Creating good habits and a culture of continuous improvement is not something that just happens, but instead something that is nurtured. Well-known BPM methodologies like six sigma embrace this concept and involve putting in place specific qualitycontrol rules and highlighting the need for reporting error rates, for example.

What they have done is standardize a framework for governance, where the whole organization understands the importance of quality, what role they play in it, and what tools they have at their disposal. Even organizations that do not want to adopt a methodology such as six sigma should look at setting up a governance framework, where beyond the policies, procedures, and tools,

it is also clear that people are allocated sufficient time to support the continuous improvement.

Audit
Another important element in this framework is the need to audit. Audits are a help, not a hindrance to the process, even though they are often seen as such. In order to provide efficient processes, employees must abide by established procedures. If those are not observed, the question, then, is “why not?” The answer can mandate company retraining in the newly established procedures or lead to other improvements as needed to improve BPM within the enterprise.

Monitoring
In order to continuously grow, improve, and catalyze frictionless audits, new processes must be monitored. Specific key performance indicators (KPIs) should be determined up front and monitored over time. These are often represented in a dashboard overview, which enables high-velocity status checks.

Continuous measurement and comparison is the most effective form of monitoring, since it will provide for frequent BPM adjustments as needed. It enables an easy evaluation of changes, including various small elements in the process chain.

You must examine the appropriate KPIs, however, as well as other key inputs. Focusing on the wrong ones and disregarding other important issues gives a faulty picture. Focusing only on high-output KPIs, for example, does not mean that all the output is correct.

An Approach to Choosing a Business Process Management Suite
In their promotional materials, BPM vendors make their suites sound ideal. All the business process management suites have a broad

range of features. They all provide superior benefits. And they all handle a wide variety of applications. With the market wide open,

vendors are trying to satisfy a broad range of needs. However, this complicates the choice of a BPM suite.

How Should An Organization Go About Selecting A BPM Software Suite?

1. Define the process needs. While most business process management suites provide the basics, they differ in the richness of their features and capabilities, including support for things like business rule management, content management, human interaction, and so on. By the same token, a particular process may have a certain level of need for each of these capabilities. Defining the process needs helps determine the level of the company's needs and simplifies the selection process.

2. Look for a business process management suite that defines the modeling needs. Most BPM vendors claim that their suites reduce the need for programming to build production solutions and enable business analysts to play a more direct role in modeling and implementation. But they do so in different degrees. Some provide a single modeling environment shared by business analysts and executable process designers. Others provide separate tools for each step. Regardless of what approach is taken, collaboration must occur between business and IT. Look for a system that matches the company's capabilities and culture.

3. Research business process management suites and vendors. Several industry reports by respected analysts and consultants provide information on the many of today's existing suites. Some of these are available free from industry sources. Others are available at a small cost. Obtain one or more of these reports, review them carefully to see what each suite/vendor has to offer, and then develop a list of appropriate suites.

4. Check out similar implementations. Once a list has been developed, ask the vendor for implementation references. Check these out thoroughly. Right now there are no industry-wide standards that can help compare vendor claims. Researching these implementations is the best way of judging if a suite does what its vendor claims it does. Then eliminate the ones that do not measure up. That should result in a short list.

5. Develop a detailed RFP. Create a detailed request for proposal (RFP) to send to the short list. As part of the RFP, include what one firm calls a "small focused proof-of-concept application," if that makes sense for the company. The application will provide a true test for the suite and the vendor.

In summary, business process management software suites are constantly evolving. Eventually, BPM software suites will provide a more definitive solution for a company's needs. For now, however, if a company wants to find the best solution available, the company will have to do due diligence to match its needs with a suite's capabilities. 

ISO 9001 FAQ provides answers to commonly asked questions about the ISO 9000 family of quality management standards.