|
Full Article Business Process Management Activities
The activities which constitute business process management can be grouped into three categories; design, execution and monitoring.
Process design
This encompasses either the design or capture of existing processes. In addition the processes may be simulated in order to test them. The software support for these activities consists of graphical editors to document the processes and repositories to store the process models.
Process execution
The traditional way to achieve the automatic execution of processes is that an application is developed or brought from an external firm which executes the steps required. However, in practice, the applications developed only execute a small part of the overall process. Execution of a complete business process is only achieved by using a patchwork of interfacing software (transferring the data from one application to another) and human intervention (for example, reading the data printed out from one application and entering it into another). In addition, certain process steps can only be accomplished with human intervention (for example, deciding on a major credit application). Due to the complexity that this approach engenders, changing a process is costly and an overview of the processes and in which state they are in is difficult to obtain.
As a response to these problems a relatively new category of software has become available, the Business Process Management System (BPMS). This allows the complete business process (as developed in the process design activity) to be defined as a language which can be directly executed by the BPMS (see #standards ) .The BPMS will either use services in the applications to perform complex business operations (e.g. calculating a repayment plan for a loan) or will send messages to human workers requesting assistance for certain tasks which can not be automated. As the process definition is directly executable, changes in the process can be (in comparison to the traditional approach of application development or maintenance) quickly placed into operation. In order to work effectively a BPMS often requires that the underlying software is constructed according to the principles of a service-oriented architecture .
The commercial BPMS software market has focused on graphical process model development, rather than language based process models, as a means to reduce the complexity of model development. Natural language business rules is a growing area of importance in BPMS as these rules provide governing behavior to the BPMS while remaining in human readable form. Much of the domain knowledge in the organization that a BPMS must capture is done so with natural language business rules . Process monitoring
This encompasses either the tracking of individual process so that information on their state can be easily seen or the provision of statistics on their performance. An example of the first point is being able to determine the state of a customer order (e.g. ordered arrived, awaiting delivery, invoice paid) so that problems in its operation can be easily identified and corrected. In addition, this information can also be used to provide customers of an organization with timely information which they can use to improve their own processes or just as a means to increase customer loyalty. Examples of the second point are the generation of statistics on how quickly a customer order is processed, how many orders were processed in the last month etc..
Although all this can be performed using current applications, the use of a BPMS is expected to ease the development of such reporting and manufacturers of BPMSs will often offer process monitoring software as well.
Although the initial focus of BPM was on the automation of business processes this has since been extended to include support for processes in which human interaction takes place. A common form is where individual steps in the business process which require human knowledge, judgment or experience to be performed are assigned to the appropriate members of an organization (analogous to workflow systems). More advanced forms are in supporting the complex interaction between human workers in performing a task. In each case the BPM software tools are used to support these processes as well as to define and monitor them.
There is also a growing interest in the use of BPMS as a means to understand the organization through the expanded set of relational data a BPMS can be used to manage and present. This includes the relationships of processes (which can often span multiple tiers) to each other which, when included in the process model, provides the ability to draw on these relationships for advanced reporting and analysis that is typcially not available. |