Business Process Management
Business Process Management
Business processes should be executed effective and efficiently in order to achieve organizational goals. In order to do this, business processes should be analyzed and improved continuously.
Continuous improvement of business process in terms of cost and time is essential for gaining competitive advantage in today’s business world. Competition in the business world takes no longer place between the people, organizations nor products but between business process and the output of these business processes.
Business Process Management within an organization is classified in 3 main categories.
- Managerial Processes
- Core Processes
- Support Processes
Business Process Management activities focus on critical processes.
The difference of Business Process Management from other management techniques is to have process based organizational structure and operations. In other words, this management technique aims for a process based, lean organization rather than a department based hierarchical management technique.
The major organizational difference of this management technique is to a have a role called “Process Responsible” within the organization. The personal in this role, being directly connected to the top management, will design the processes and monitor the process performances continuously in accordance to the critical process performance indicators. Further, this personal is also responsible for bringing out or enabling others to bring out ideas for improvement of the process, for projecting or to enabling other to project the improvement ideas, following up and controlling projects, reporting to higher level managers, Process responsibles focus primarily on critical business process which will enable improvement of the future performance of the organization.
Critical processes can be also called, process category and customer process. Critical processes start with the customer and end with the customer.
Business Process Management, despite including numerous improvement methodologies, three methodologies have been put in practice in wide range of application fields worldwide.
Business Process Improvement subjects and techniques are given below.
- Continuous Improvement
- Business Process Benchmarking
- Business Process Reengineering
As seen above, Business Process management being an engineering study, effective and efficient use of above subjects will increase its chance of success.
- Time – Process Simulation
- Cost – Activity Based Costing
- Variation – Statistical Process Control
Business Process Management in contrast to other improvement methodologies has an inwards improvement approach. Criticality of process or activities, factors required to be measured, what the performance indicators should measure, what should improvements focus on after the measurement are decided according to the Voice of Customer. This emphasizes on effectiveness rather than efficiency.
On the other hand, business process management activities are a part of Strategic Business Plan. Therefore, formulation of organizational strategies by the upper management constitutes the basis for these activities.