Top Three Benefits of BPM

The merit of BPM needs to focus on solving business problems, not just conquering technical challenge.

BPM as an abbreviation can mean Business Process Management, Business Process Modeling, Business Process Monitoring or Business Performance Monitoring. Wikipedia recognizes Business Performance Monitoring, Business Process Management and Business process Modeling, all under "BPM"- Business Process Management. BPM is indeed more strategic imperative for improving business maturity, so what are the top three benefits of BPM?

The "empowerment" of people. Real time feedback reporting allows this. Since most work today is a mix of structured and unstructured work, so it make more sense in talking about ACM/BPM/ BAM instead of BPM only. Having said this, with the modern data analytics technology,  it is becoming more and more difficult to justify having separate BAM tool just for BPM monitoring and reporting. With good BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) tools, you can monitor anything in the enterprise, even if you don't have BPM. Without BAM, the reporting available in BPM is backward looking and typically somewhat static. BAM provides real-time visibility into what is happening now. BAM and BPM are very complimentary, but distinct sets of tools and capabilities, and they do work in concert. BPM defines KPIs, process flows, SLAs and produces data which BAM monitors and reports. BAM would not be very helpful without knowing what the process model is and what the performance and business metrics are that we are interested in. Surely 'automation" was put in place plan-site so that it becomes a benefit of "Business Process Mapping". If the BPMs run time environment is a Case environment, it empowers users by allowing them to skip over tasks, re-visit completed tasks, insert tasks not in the template and record data at tasks that are not yet current. All of this, comes from background ACM which provides governance. 

 Insight – It’s definitely a benefit of Business Process Monitoring in that if your run time environment accommodates background BPM (Business Process Management) i.e. a mapped, improved, compiled business process template where process steps post automatically at User Interface, users get to see the tasks they have to perform (tasks automatically post to the attention of users who have the appropriate skill sets to perform these). There are two other dimensions to "insight": (a) the ability to visually track which sub-pathways an instance went through (providing the environment is able to "mark up" a copy of the process map for each instance).( b) the opportunity to carry out data mining on data collected. 

Simplicity - "Simplicity means people can understand what to do, when, how to fix, what to fix, how to react, who owns the problem, what the impact is, when we need to deploy more people and what people they are". The benefits of "business process management" (having processes, encouraging consistent use of these, taking the time to collect data, analyzing run time data from instances with a view of increasing competitive advantage) quite simply are the ability to do the rights things in the right way, using the right resources at the right times/places.

There’re BPM management tradeoffs between short term gains with long term business benefit. The merit of BPM needs to focus on solving business problems, not just conquering technical challenge; it has to stick to the long term goal such as harnessing business maturity, and pick some low hanging fruits as well to improve organizational efficiency.

Posted in: Business Process Management