By Malik Azeez, Director of PIM
In today’s dynamic marketplace with demand for quality products, organizations require a strong discipline in managing internal business processes efficiently and swiftly. When a business has experienced resources handling daily operations, it is only natural for them to become the source of all the informational activities. Though it is assumed that all the information processes are well documented and followed by peers, that is usually not the case. Often, we encounter huge organizations tangled in decision making processes, delaying a critical output, whether to an end user, vendor or executive. As companies mature they tend to modify their strategies for an incumbent resource or a software, resulting in process debris.
What is business process management (BPM)?
- Gartner explains BPM as “a discipline that uses various tools and methods to design, model, execute, monitor, and optimize business processes.” A well-defined BPM strategy reduces overhead caused by repetitive tasks, eliminating errors that lead to rework and enabling customers to focus on the growth of their business.
- Whereas Informatica defines BPM as a “process automation and application integration that integrates users, systems, and processes via purpose-built tools that both citizen integrators and developers can use.” BPM is also seen as an IT function that can truly enable seamless integration with multiple systems and tools to achieve a common business objective.
BPM provides a structured approach to task execution in an organization, along with transparency and compliance standards. Since the processes are defined and automated with appropriate tools and framework, BPM creates an easily scalable business to customers.
In 2016, a Gartner research note stated that 80% of organizations conducting business process management projects will experience an internal rate of return better than 15%.
In one of my recent projects, there was a need to inform business stakeholders globally about a new item being introduced within the company, following which was an approval required by various leaders before this item was syndicated down to market channels. With the introduction of BPM, every step from item creation to introduction to market was meticulously orchestrated in the tool, resulting in reducing many hours of back-and-forth communication amongst stakeholders. A process that would typically take a week came down to a day! As you can imagine, we have lessened the manual activities, avoided lost revenue opportunity, and improved quality of the output.
A typical approach like the use case above contains:
- Current state assessment identifying time consuming/business bottlenecks/revenue draining activities
- Identify critical business objectives and KPIs
- Define repeatable processes, business rules, and user roles aligned to end goals
- Perform an ROI analysis (direct – costs, profits, quality; indirect – lost revenue, compliance, single source)
- Optimize the process model
- Identify the appropriate software solution
- Implement, educate and measure
In order to achieve a successful BPM solution, it is paramount to have a stellar data management system as a foundational structure. A data management tool defines the consistency of data from various sources. By doing so, data that is utilized in BPM are pertinent to the users who may or may not know the multiple facets of their organizational data structures. Similarly, if a specific department is tasked by the BPM process to make amendments to the data, it can carry out at ease with a cohesive data management engine.
In another project, our team implemented both the master data management (MDM) and business process management (BPM) solution with automated quality checks, leading to ~70% faster updates to product data and ~60% resource time savings. In other words, the BPM algorithm proactively modified any data discrepancy through the MDM solution, before involving any specific user group to review the adjustments!
Curious what impact business process management can have in your organization? Still need to set the stage with foundational data management? Explore what success can look like with our data management experts!