Business Process Management has been around for some time. However it has often confused potential customers rather than making it easy for people to adopt BPM to reap the rewards of process automation.
What is BPM?
Business Process Management is a management approach to improve the business processes in order to make them more efficient, effective and agile or quick to change as and when needed. Technology based BPM systems or suites have enhanced the concept by providing GUI design environments which even the non-technical people can use to design or model their business processes. This has tremendously increased the application of BPM to a wide range of business processes. Especially the processes that require large volume of transactions, or complex collaboration and integration with disparate systems, or rules based decision making, or transactions that require full audit trail for compliance are best suited for BPM.
There are a number of BPM technologies out there, from high priced third party software to open source BPM suites. Open source solutions tend to offer the best of both worlds. Not only they are free to use but open source solutions like jBPM and Process Maker come with GUI development environments and plug-ins to make the life of a business analyst real easy.
How can BPM benefit compliance?
Business process improvement is continuously ranked as the top business priority by business managers, according to a recent survey. There are many options for improving the business processes – ranging from complete process re-engineering to adopting new process management methodologies, such as Lean Six Sigma, or adding new capabilities to existing system. An investment in the right BPM suite can enable an organisation to embark on a sustainable business process improvement programme.
Mikel Harry, one of the founders of the Six Sigma methodology, has documented the economic impact of focusing on process improvement. Using the base measure of his methodology – Sigma, Dr. Harry provides a tangible example of how companies like GE have benefited from a commitment to process improvement:
With just a one-sigma shift, companies will experience a 20 percent margin improvement, a 12 to 18 percent increase in capacity, a 12 percent reduction in the number of employees, as well as a 10 to 30 percent capital reduction.
(Source: Six Sigma: The Breakthrough Management Strategy, Mikel Harry, Richard Schroeder)
The core benefits of BPM include efficiency, effectiveness and agility. The first benefit seen of a business improvement is that of improved efficiency. For example, Darlington Borough Council realised savings of 1,000 hours when they moved their manual accident and incident reporting (including manual data entry to MS Access database) to jComply Accident and Incident Management Module.
As the efficiencies are realised, the organisation focuses on making the process more effective. Often inconsistencies and loop holes are realised when the new processes are implemented. For example, in a healthcare organisation, patient pathway was reduced to 18 weeks (nearly 25%) as a result of cancelling the repetition of tasks performed in two different departments.
One of the most useful benefits of BPM is that organisations can continue to change and adapt their business processes to the changing business needs. Agility is a well known concept in a more technical arena of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Some of our customers change their processes a few times a year. The cost on the process change so insignificant, it is easily superseded by increase in efficiency, effectiveness and conformance to regulations.
Merging BPM with Compliance
jComply BPM is a compliance application based on a Business Process Management Suite. jComply has all the features of an enterprise compliance application such as policy and procedure management, version control, reusable question library, eLearning, audit trail, scheduling, escalation and reporting. Combining the compliance features with BPM Suite, has powered jComply with workflow based task management and real time notifications to produce solutions such as the following:
• Accident and Incident Management
• Know Your Customer forms including Client Fact Find and Customer Due Diligence
• Health and Safety checklist and reporting
• Risk Assessment form
• Supply chain procedure management
To learn more about jComply, visit http://www.jcomply.com/ or email sales@tabaqsoftware.com or call +44 1344 668400.
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