Intention and content of the article

Review the academic paper on Business Process Management.

This is an article review for an article  called “take control of the processes to master the digital’, written by James Francis. The article talks about the importance of Business process management to a company, the advantages that BPM provides to an organization. Business processes are talked about a lot and often mainly in connection with business automation. Business process is a logical sequence of actions of a person (or several people) in a team. The purpose of the description of the business process is the analysis and regulation of certain actions in the team. The business process always happens with the participation of a person. If the actions are performed by an automatic system or program, it is no longer a business, but a process or specification. And then several other standards, methods of description and features of implementation come into force.  The author states how business process management has given an edge to FlowCentric Technologies and a competitive advantage over its competitors.

The article talks about the  possibility of continuous improvement  of business processes and, accordingly, improvement of business goals achievement (increase in revenue, profit, business value, market share, quality of products and services, customer satisfaction, etc.). Appears due to:Identification and formalization of key business processes within a single repository of descriptions;Tasks of key indicators of productivity and efficiency of business processes, automated collection and analysis of statistics on their implementation; Making corrective changes to the implementation of business processes in the BPM solution and their immediate acceptance into work; Continuous repetition of these steps within the framework of the classical Deming cycle (Planning, Implementation, Control, Adjustment).

Reducing  the execution time of processes due to their regulation and automation of individual steps. All performers will know exactly who, what and in what order should do. If something the machine can do, it will be done by the machine without the participation of a person or with its minimum participation. Decrease in the share of erroneous operations due to the fact that the business process is “directed” by the system. Accordingly, a decrease in the share of marriage, improving the quality of products and services provided.

Ensuring compliance with SLA requirements. For each task of each process, time constraints can be defined to match specific SLA indicators and the BPM system will automatically monitor them, issue warnings when disrupting deadlines, and / or offer pre-defined corrective actions. Significant increase in transparency of operating activities. For example, for each of the dozens, hundreds or thousands of simultaneous sales orders, all interested persons will be able to see the current stage of its execution, responsible persons and other related information. Descriptions of business processes become “alive”, and the organization is much more flexible. In order to make adjustments to the business processes described on paper (in the form of schemes, regulations, job descriptions), it takes days, weeks or months. Changes in the business processes performed in the BPM-system can be made in a few minutes.

Benefits of Business Process Management

Improve the quality of corporate information. In the process of executing business processes, information appears that should be reflected in various information systems used in the organization. For example, in the accounting system, CRM-system, electronic document management system, corporate portal, etc. BPM-solution provides integration of these systems at the level of business processes and ensures that the required information will fall into the required systems in the required form and at the required time, which is quite difficult to finish by manually entering information into the system.

According to the author ,Modeling business processes help to solve two problems at the same time: First, Study of business. Graphical representation in the form of schemes, i.e. modeling of business processes allows you to quickly understand the features of the company’s work and identify possible “bottlenecks.” Second, Providing visibility. As you know, “one picture is worth a thousand words. That is why the schematic representation of the company’s work helps the manager and the business owner to understand the essence of the problem much quicker and evaluate the proposed solutions. In the work of a business consultant (by the way, as well as a specialist in the implementation of software products) it is very important that the client understands all the advantages of the solution.

 No less important is the feedback – the manager on the scheme will be able to see some shortcomings even at the stage of the project discussion, and the implementation will do without additional difficulties and making changes to the project “on the go. And the combination of studying the history of the occurrence of the term with   personal experience gives the following definition: Business processes are necessary to present complex information in a simple for perception form for studying and making decisions.

The fact is that after the introduction of information systems, the complexity of organizing people’s work in organizations has increased many times. Also, machines do not understand abstraction; they need a strict algorithm and a certain order of introduction and processing of information. If before the beginning of automation, when information passed directly from person to person, the problem of mutual understanding was at the level of human communications, now it became necessary to strictly regulate it. As a result, it was necessary to create descriptions of the work of not only people in the organization but also their interaction with information systems. And here there were not enough text notations (instructions), where all descriptions were in free text form, they were not relevant and inconvenient. There was a need for standardization, in fact, in the creation of a special command language and an unambiguous sequence of actions. And, unlike machine languages, these notations should have become equally convenient for translation into machine code, and for human perception.

Modeling Business Processes

It is important to analyze business environment of ann enterprises as the basis for process management, and a criteria assessment of the dependence of business environment factors is proposed. The local environment (the environment of direct impact) is factors that directly affect the operations of the organization and are directly affected by the operations of the organization.

The global environment (indirect impact environment) – the most common forces, events and trends that are not directly related to the operational activities of the organization, but generally form the context of the business;The international environment (business environment of multinational companies) – when the company goes beyond the country of origin and begins to develop foreign markets, the factors of international business come into effect.However, to study the relative competitive positions of the enterprise in the industry, key success factors are used. The task of the enterprise environment analysis is to identify the key factors of the enterprise’s competitive position in the industry. They serve as a cornerstone in the planning of business processes, but at the same time, they vary from industry to industry. It should be noted the importance of analyzing the business environment of the enterprise, which is the basis for modeling, which in turn determines the effectiveness of process management. Failure to analyze can lead to unrealizable management decisions. According to the article Therefore, the most important objects of analysis should be:Evaluation of the external environment of the business regarding compliance of business processes with the situation on the market.

 Assessment of regional factors of the basing of the enterprise; Evaluation of the internal environment of the business in terms of the potential financial condition of the enterprise in the case of an attractive business environment. With all the variety of existing methods of analyzing the business environment of an enterprise, it is difficult to choose a method that would allow for taking into account the specifics of the enterprise’s activity, the scale of its activities, the features of territorial basing and could become the basis

To determine the degree of influence of a factor on the business processes occurring at the enterprise. In this regard, it becomes relevant to develop such a methodology for analyzing the business environment, the results of which will facilitate the introduction of process management in the enterprise, which in turn will allow modeling business processes based on the business environment. One of the most important characteristics of the enterprise environment is the interdependence of factors, in which a change in one factor leads to a change in the other. Based on the study of theoretical and practical material on the investigated problem, we developed a methodology for assessing the dependence of the activity of a machine-building enterprise on environmental factors.

Analyzing the Business Environment of an Enterprise

The  fact that in a world where everything is constantly changing, the competitiveness of an organization is largely determined by its ability to react quickly and effectively to the changes that are taking place. Therefore, the management of business processes based on this approach is one of the key principles of any organization that is striving not only to survive but to successfully carry out its activities in the long term. The activity of the modern organization is based on a complex system of interrelationships between projects and processes. A particular project implemented in the organization is built into the structure of existing business processes and uses them to achieve ultimate goals. In this regard, the ordering and optimization of existing business processes are important, taking into account the requirements of the projects being implemented and the influences of the external and internal environment.

Based on the fact that about 80-85% of business process operations are typically repetitive, detailed rules of action are drawn up for them. Thus, the process of the main activity can be set up as efficiently as possible, and the leader is included in the process only if there are any unusual situations or problems. From this, one can speak of the systematization of the company’s activities, which manifests itself in the emergence of two main effects:  due to the fact that the management structure relies on the structure of business processes existing in the organization, the number of levels of management and subordination decreases, and 2) the effectiveness of management increases by increasing the manageability standards (an average of 2-3 times) as the manipulated variable in this case is aimed at coordinating the staff and involved in the process only if any irregularities and deviations from the normal course of business.

Conclusion

The main emphasis in solving problems in an organization is that for the construction of a network structure, a transition to process management is necessary (if this was not done before), since the functional hierarchical principle can not organize the activity in the most efficient and least expensive way. Business process management will solve most of the organizational issues, as well as effectively organize the management by subdivisions due to a high degree of independence in making model decisions on adaptation to the existing external environment. In this case, in many cases, three tools are used together. Adepartmental management model based on a process approach and determining the measure of branch autonomy  an adaptive and environmentally appropriate optimal structure  the normative documents and instructions that regulate the work of the network units developed in the center.

References

Ananthan, B, H Appannaiah, & P Reddy, Business Management. in , New Delhi, Himalaya Pub. House, 2010.

Cogliandro, J, Intelligent innovation. in , Fort Lauderdale, Fla., J. Ross Pub., 2007.

Eliot, G, The mill on the Floss. in , New York, Open Road Integrated Media, 2016.

Havinal, V, Management and entrepreneurship. in , New Delhi, New Age International (P) Ltd., Publishers, 2009.

Klussmann, W, Philosophy of leadership. in , Hamburg, Diplomica Verlag, 2009.

Kumar, A, Business process management. in , New York, Routledge, 2018.

1. Sanders Jones, J, & K Linderman, “Process management, innovation and efficiency performance.”. in Business Process Management Journal, 20, 2014, 335-358.

Mohapatra, S, Business process reengineering. in , [Place of publication not identified], Springer, 2015.

Scheer, A, Agility by ARIS. in , New York, Springer, 2006.

Wysocki, R, Project Management Process Improvement. in , Norwood, Artech House, 2004.