BPM Benefits?

[CDM]

One of the users at IOD this week asked:
Our company is trying to get started with BPM. Can anyone tell us what some of the advantages might be of using this methodology/technology.

[Mary BPM]

There are three key benefits of implementing business process management:

1) Maximizing Business Effectiveness : Business process management identifies and clearly documents a business's most strategic business tasks, and helps optimize those business processes to drive maximum ROI and competitive differentiation, as well as conforming to corporate standards. For example, by using business process modeling with simulation, business users and IT can clearly identify which processes have the best ROI, so that those projects are given top priority. By having a clear understanding of business processes and related costs and resources needed, business can reduce costs by eliminating unnecessary process steps, duplicate processes, and manual processes. Business process modeling fosters stronger communication between the business and IT teams to work together to support the company's strategy.

2) Responsiveness: BPM enables increased operational effectiveness for IT and a better match with business requirements and IT deliverables. Business process management tools can validate the business process model prior to deployment, such that the business analyst can realize if they made a mistake in the model and correct it before sharing the model with IT. Utilizing business process modeling coupled with an overall business process management strategy, you can quickly modify applications to adapt business processes on demand as a result of changes in the market or competitive threats.

3) Business Flexibility: The key word to this benefit is "business", in that the business leaders and process analysts can modify the business process without having to go to IT. With business process modeling, the business user has a tool to modify and simulate business processes, to see how a new business process will run and affect the business. New or modified business process models can reuse components, services, and sub-processes of existing processes across organizations and functional areas. A business user can then share the model with IT to deploy new applications, products and services quickly to respond to the ever-changing business needs.

[varjun]

In addition to above, BPM increases operational visibility by tying together all the activities that make up a process and maintains the business context throughout. Potential impact to a business if an activity takes more time to complete is immediately visible and reduces the latency to take a corrective action. In the absence of BPM the most common problem is the impact of IT failure or bottleneck on business will not be immediately apparent.

[ms1mm0]

Yes I agree. Operational visibility is key to understanding what is happening inside your business so that you can assess whether your processes are aligned with meeting the goals of the business. This in turn drives continual process improvement and innovation. There are two levels of visibility :

(1) business level visibility (am I meeting my business goals, how much did that process instance cost, what is the progress on a particlulare order, am I achieving the right levels of customer service, etc..)
(2) IT level visibility (how many processes instances completed, what was the avg completion time, how many processes breached their execution time, how many failed, what went wrong and why, am I meeting my technical service level agreements)

Mark S

[DCM]

And what about the limitations?