"With Presence, our costs are lower and business response has improved - it is excellent.” Eileen Richardson |
"With Presence, our costs are lower and business response has improved - it is excellent.” Eileen Richardson |
Did you know that every single business in the world has one thing in common? From the smallest one-man operation to the largest global corporations, they all share one fundamental aspect. Do you know what it is? The answer is that they every business can be broken down and examined as a simple collection of 'business processes'. So what is a 'Business Process'? |
A business process is simply the series of 'steps' that the employees inside an organization follow on a day to day basis to 'get business done' Each of these steps or activities may be as simple as entering data into an application, signing off a form or making an informed decision based on the data available. Individually these single activities may seem rather insignificant, but when you remember that they are being repeated hundreds, if not thousands of times a year by employees, then you begin to understand how eliminating unnecessary activities throughout your business could save large amounts of time and resources. Virtually everything an employee does during their working day (apart from gossiping by the water cooler!) is part of a business process. Some examples of simple business processes include:
To see a comprehensive list of common business processes, download our free report: Business processes vary in complexity and can often involve a number of different people, multiple departments and various IT systems at different stages along the way. Interestingly, it is often at these 'interaction points', when information moves from one departments to another or between IT applications, that business processes breakdown and bottlenecks, administrative errors and other problems occur. In recent years, a direct relationship between business processes and business performance has emerged. It has become clear that if you improve your business processes, then the performance of your business will improve as a result. This has lead to process-centric management approaches like Six Sigma becoming very popular and the huge rise in popularity of Business Process Management. So what is Business Process Management (BPM)? Well from our experience, Business Process Management can mean different things to different people, but we like to keep it simple and describe BPM as the discipline of: 1) Modeling your business processes (i.e. creating step-by-step graphical diagrams of your processes). 2) Using these models to analyze your processes and identify areas that could be improved or eliminated. 3) Implementing changes to procedure and technology to improve your processes. ... and then repeating, to create a continuous cycle of improvement. If you take two businesses that provide similar products or services, have you ever considered what will make one company more successful than the other? It is often only their business processes which separate them. It is very likely that the more successful business will have more efficient processes in place that allow them to:
Your business processes define your company and how you do business - are all of your processes better than your competitors? Breaking down and modeling your business processes can be an eye-opening experience in itself. Simply seeing an entire process laid out clearly in front of you can be very revealing. When our customers start modeling their processes, many of them find themselves asking 'Why on earth are we doing 'X' like this?' and they usually discover that the answer is simply 'because we have always done it like that!' Taking some time to model your key business processes can be one of the fastest and most effective ways to quickly identify ways increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve performance. To learn more about process modeling, download our free guide: Although potential improvements can be easy to identify in your process models, actually applying certain types of improvements can be expensive and difficult using traditional methods. This is especially true when it comes to updating your legacy, hard-coded IT systems and accessing the data you really need to improve performance. This is why we developed our Business Process Management software PresenceBPM. |
