Business process management
Let's now look at the broader picture of business process management, which includes business process modeling. It is, however, much more than just modeling. It is about achieving the highest level of efficiency in terms of time and cost in performing any business activity. This has been the guiding principle of successful businesses for a long time. In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, published the following four principles of scientific management:
- Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks
- Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than leave them to train themselves
- Provide detailed instructions and supervise how each worker performs in his or her discrete task
- Divide work equally between managers and workers so that the managers apply scientific management principles to plan the work and the workers actually perform the tasks
Taylor defined ideas precisely about how to implement business processes efficiently. His belief was that this is possible only through enforced standardization of methods, adoption of best practices, working conditions, and cooperation.
Today, these thoughts are grouped under BPM, which is a method of aligning a business organization with the needs of its clients. BPM fosters business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. The major objective of BPM is to continuously improve the processes both within the company and with other companies (such as in supply chain management).
Business process life cycle
Until now, we saw that business processes are dynamic. To express the various stages of the business process, the business process life cycle has to be defined. A business process life cycle has to cover the following four phases:
- Process modeling is related to the definition of the process model using the selected methodology and the notation.
- Process implementation is related to the activities required to implement end-to-end IT support for the process.
- Process execution and control is related to the actual running of the process, the supervisors controlling the process execution, and taking necessary corrective actions.
- Process monitoring, analytics, and optimization is related to gathering data about the process execution. BPM provides the ability to gather real-time quantitative data using process monitoring or BAM tools. Optimization is responsible for interpreting these monitoring numbers and identifying optimization points.
The following figure shows how a process enters this circle and goes through various stages:
Figure 2: Business process life cycle
Process modeling is the phase where process analysts, together with process owners, analyze the business process and define the process model. They define the activity flow, information flow, roles, and business documents. They also define business policies and constraints, business rules, and performance measures. Performance measures are often called key performance indicators (KPIs). Examples of KPIs include activity turnaround time, activity cost, and so on.
Process implementation is the phase where the IT developers (SOA developers), together with process analysts, implement the business process with the objective of providing end-to-end support for the process using IT (applications). The process implementation phase using the SOA approach includes process implementation with executable BPMN, BPEL, decomposition in the services, identification of the service, implementation or reuse of services, and integration.
Process execution and control is the actual execution phase, where the process participants execute the various activities of the process. For end-to-end support in business processes, it is very important that IT drives the process and directs process participants to execute activities and not vice versa, where the actual process drivers are employees. An important part of this phase is process control, where process supervisors or process managers monitor whether the process is executing optimally. If delays occur, exceptions arise, resources are unavailable, or some other anomalies occur, process supervisors or managers can take corrective actions.
Process monitoring, analytics, and optimization is the final, and a very important, phase. In this phase, process owners monitor the KPIs of the process. Process analysts, process owners, process supervisors, and key users examine the process and analyze the process execution metrics. They also need to take into account the changing business conditions. They examine business issues and identify ways to improve business processes to eliminate these issues.
Once optimizations have been identified and selected, the process returns to the modeling phase to apply them. Then the process is re-implemented, and the whole life cycle is repeated. We talk about an iterative, incremental life cycle because the process is improved in each stage.
