BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT Business process management also known as BPM is a step by step approach to increase the efficiency of an organizations workflow and tuning it towards adaptability in an ever changing work environment. Basically the goal of business process management is to drastically reduce human error and poor communication and focus align stakeholders with the company’s goals and objectives. Business process management is a point of connection in a company between the line of business and the IT departments. In business process management there are three different types of frameworks available, the horizontal, the vertical and the pre-built templates. A full service business process management suit has five core components which are: •
Process discovery and project scoping
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Process modeling and design
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Business rules engine
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Workflow engine
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Simulation and testing
The business process management is built to automate the business process by employing information technology and goes beyond this primary objective by integrating human driven processes in which human interaction takes place in tandem with technology. Business process management has different phases from the design to the monitoring and certification phase. These phases help design and perfect and efficient process. A business process management system is designed to contain existing processes and intended process to be implemented by the company. A well designed business process management reduces problems likely to be encountered within the duration the process is in effect. Irrespective of existing processes the aim of the design phase is to come up with an efficient and feasible theoretical design.
After the design phase the modeling phase comes in. the modeling phase takes the theoretical design and takes into account variables such as fluctuations in price to analyze how the design will cope under different scenarios. After the modeling the process is then executed using software often augmented with human input. Business rules have been used to govern behavioral definitions and process execution and resolution can be driven with the business rule engine. The tracking of individual processes so that the level of efficiency can easily be ascertained is called monitoring. This enables developers and designers provide accurate statistical data on each process. The amount of information the business wants to analyze dictates the extent of monitoring that will be carried out. Monitoring also depends on how the business wants to gather information, which could be real time information gathering, near real time or ad-hoc. The optimization of a process is the application of process performance information gotten from the monitoring phase, identifying glitches in the design, and other improvements that can be made down the way. Optimization increases the efficiency of the business process management and creates a greater business value. When optimization fails to achieve the desired results forecasted in the design process, it then becomes necessary to go back to the drawing board and reengineer the entire process. Business process reengineering is aimed at getting the a highly efficient system.