What is business process management (BPM)? Looking at the definition, it designates a holistic management approach, focused on aligning all aspects of an organisation with the wants and needs of clients. The idea is that organisations need to act effectively and efficiently, while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. In such an approach, there is no big step or big project. There is a continuous improvement process… BPM is a process for improving processes. As Bruno Magal, manager at KPMG states, “BPM is used to understand, manage, and improve organisation processes focusing on value added products and services to customers.” According to these principles, “BPM can be applied to any kind of company, independent of their structure and their size. Indeed, all structures, even SMEs, have processes. These, however might not be defined or formalized. BPM can therefore be used to produce better processes.” And if size does not matter, neither does the sector in which BPM can be applied: “processes can be defined for any activity producing goods or services for customers.”
Good orchestration required
By considering processes to be strategic assets of an organisation, BPM also implies that they must be understood, managed, and improved to deliver value added products and services to clients. Process orchestration aims at automating the execution of the workflow underlying each process. Thereby process orchestration helps achieve objectives such as reducing manual processing, enforcing the defined processes, and lowering operational risks. Furthermore, the orchestration of the implemented processes provides valuable information in order to assess their efficiencies and identify potential for improvement.
The key benefits to BPM are precisely the lasting effect of the approach: “it attempts to improve processes continuously, in order to help organisations to be more efficient, more effective and more flexible. BPM also focuses on the alignment between business and IT, the reduction of complexity through standardisation, the risk management, the process transparency and the performance monitoring.”
In other words, BPM can be used to identify the bottlenecks and increase business value, for example by helping managers optimise and reorganise the activities of the company, or by re-assigning resources.