Business and organizations need systems, strategies and programs that can help them grow, deal with competition, offer better products and services and above all achieve their goals and objectives. Business process management is one service that enables businesses to be more effective, efficient and be able to adapt to the ever changing business environment. A business process is essentially a set of activities that will enable a business to achieve a specific objective.
The aim of Business process management is to eliminate human error and lack of communication and to enable stakeholders to focus on their roles. It covers how we study, observe, identify, monitor and change business operations and process to ensure they run smoothly. BPM is regarded as a business practice, involving techniques as well as structured methods.
Business process management should not be a one-time thing. For efficiency and smooth running of the business, BPM should be a continuous evaluation of the existing processes and must include taking the necessary actions to enhance the total flow of the entire process. This will lead to an uninterrupted cycle of evaluating and improvement of the entire organization.
Business process management involves the following:
• Creating process and allocating ownership to ensure accountability
• Focusing on outcomes and not tasks to ensure appropriate focus maintained
• Standardization of processes across the business to reduce errors, mitigation of risks, and to ensure that all the process are properly understood and managed.
• Correcting and enhancing processes before they are automated
• Enabling continuous change to ensure that the improvements made can be extended and spread throughout the organization over time.
• Enhancing the existing processes instead of building new ones
BPM covers a wide range of process that can enhance efficiency, boost productivity and enable an organization to achieve its goals. Cost reduction solutions are covered by BPM. If these solutions are implemented, efficiency, accountability and productivity will be achieved in an organization.
The following are steps that can be recognized in Business Process Management:
Analyze: This involves analyzing a problem and understanding the cause of that particular problem.
Re-design and model: This involves revaluation of the existing processes, redesigning them and coming up with a working model.
Implement: Once you have a working model, the next step is implementing the model in the organization.
Monitor: This step involves setting up systems that will monitor the progress of implemented processes and how well it works with the entire system.
Manage: Once the processes are working the next step is to manage them and establish systems that will ensure that they are adopted by the entire organization.
Automate: This is the last step and is important to any organization that once to achieve its goals and objectives. Automation of the processes aims at reducing the human error and enhancing efficiency.
