Effective use of business process management

Business process management can not be used effectively unless you take a look at the entire company. You can separate each department and take an in depth look, but after completing the in depth looks you need to then go back and look at the company as a whole. By effectively using business process management you can find out what areas of your company need improvement and in most cases it will lead to improvements of how the company is ran.

For example, you can look at human resources and manufacturing and decide that human resources is working just fine for the company as a whole, but manufacturing is not producing units fast enough to keep up with the demand for the company, so improvements need to be made. In the overall scope of this affects the company because if it is determined that you need to hire more workers then human resources is going to be involved.

In order to fully evaluate your company using business process management you need to use all three categories of business process management. The three categories are: process design, process execution, and process monitoring.

Process design:
Process design includes all aspects of the design of your existing process, as well as how new ones will interact within your company. If your process has a good design it will reduce the amount of future problems that you may have. If the design is not very good then it can causes major problems for your business. It does not matter which process has a faulty design it is still going to cause problems in your overall business approach.

Process execution:
There are two ways to use this feature of business process management. The first approach is to develop or buy an application that executes all of the steps required to complete any business process, this way is the most common way. This approach has a major flaw, the applications that you can buy can rarely be completely accurate, they sometimes miss major steps that are needed to complete the process, which in turn will give you inaccurate results. Another approach is to use a combination of computer software that you buy and human interaction, but this method is even more difficult to use because its complexity.

A solution to the problems with the traditional methods has been developed. This is a software program that you can by that takes the full business process and translates it into a computer language so that everything can be executed by your computers. If a step in the process is too complex to translate into the computer language the program will request human input.

Process monitoring:
This category covers the tracking of each individual process. The information on each process can be easily seen so that the statistics of each process can be compared with current or previous data. Basically what you are doing here is monitoring each step taken in each process to determine if things are running smoothly.

After looking at each category on an individual basis you need to understand that the three categories run hand in hand. You can not complete business process management without using all three steps. The first two categories are what is going to tell you whether or not you need to make improvements to any of your processes. The third step is just a way for you to monitor how each individual process is working both before and after you make improvements. This is a great tool because you can see if the improvements you made to a certain process is actually helping or if things need to be reevaluated.