Business Management Process

Business Process Management (BPM) is a field of knowledge at the intersection between management and information technology, encompassing methods, techniques and tools to design, enact, control, and analyze operational business processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information.

The term 'operational business processes' refers to repetitive business processes performed by organizations in the context of their day-to-day operations, as opposed to strategic decision-making processes which are performed by the top-level management of an organization. BPM differs from business process reengineering, a management approach popular in the 1990s, in that it does not aim at one-off revolutionary changes to business processes, but at their continuous evolutionThe traditional way to automate processes is to develop or purchase an application that executes the required steps of the process. However, in practice, these applications rarely execute all the steps of the process accurately or completely. Another approach is to use a federation of software and human intervention.

Due to the complexity of the federated approach, documenting a process is difficult. This makes changing or improving the process difficult. As a response to these problems, software has been developed that enables the full business process (as developed in the process design activity) to be defined in a computer language which can be directly executed by the computer. The system will either use services in connected applications to perform business operations (e.g. calculating a repayment plan for a loan) or, when a step is too complex to automate, will message a human requesting input. Compared to either of the previous approaches, directly executing a process definition is much more straightforward and therefore easier to improve. However, automating a process definition requires flexible and comprehensive infrastructure which typically rules out implementing these systems in a legacy IT environment.

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) :
Business process management systems (BPMS) assist in the execution of business processes so that managers can create workflows, In the area of managing the business process we want the ability to react to changing business conditions. To support this capability the BPM suite needs to provide managers with access to state information. The tool will provide access to a listing of work items outstanding, the state of each work item, and how long each task has been open. For example, in a claims environment the manager should see all of the open cases and what is happening with them at any given moment.From this type of screen the user would have BPM Tools the capability to drill down on any individual work item and see the steps that have been taken and the current status of the work item.This business activity monitoring capability is a cornerstone of BPM solutions,My post Collaborating in structured business processes talked about the extreme case where a dedicated collaborative application is required to enable users to complete a complex set of human driven tasks at specific steps in the process. I illustrated an example where extensive anti-money laundering reviews were required during the account opening process for a new high-risk financial customer.

Business Process Management Solutions:
Business processes automated by a BPMS require human interaction at points in the process, like exception handling and knowledge working. In this post I want to share my opinions on how these human steps could benefit from the new generation of online word-processing and spreadsheet tools by embedding them directly into the user's processing application. Tools like Google Spreadsheet, Zoho Writer and Office Suite represent the available capabilities. The ITRedux blog provides a good listing of online office tools.Use desktop tools for collaborative 'processes'In scenarios like this, collaboration enables a set of users to work together using the tools that are most convenient to them. Typically they will produce documents using MS Office products, research tools and business specific application. The users record their working and final decisions as text documents and spreadsheets, stored within a specific collaborative workplace. Due to the lengthy and varied work that the users are performing this is probably the best approach to improving their effectiveness.Knowledge workers and other human interaction More commonly occurring than full collaborative requirements are the steps in a business process that require input from a single knowledge worker, to process a case and make decisions based on information presented to them. An example is an insurance new business process, where at certain steps an underwriter is required to assess policy terms. The underwriter is delivered the work, being presented the customer details and full application form to assist in the assessment. At this point, typical systems will leave the user to utilize external workbench tools to make their decisions. More often than not this requires that the underwriter re-key information from the original application form into a spreadsheet that enables him to determine risk and policy value. At the end of his manual processing he saves any documents that assisted in the decision to his desktop and attaches them manually to the customer case file or a shared file system.

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