Benefits of BPM
Reduce Business Process Lag Time
Most business processes follow the 90/10 Rule. At least 90% of the total time consumed by typical business processes is for lag time.
This is the time tasks are waiting in the in-baskets or queues of the performers, in transit, or consumed in tracking status. It is dead time that does not add any value to the business.
Only 10% of the total process time is consumed by the task time, the time performers actually spend working on the tasks. Personal productivity software helps decrease the task time. However, even if task time is reduced by 50%, the overall impact on the process time is only 5%. Business process automation attacks the lag time or dead time. If the lag time is reduced by 50%, the overall process time is reduced by 45%. This is why process automation is the key to enabling companies to effectively operate in Internet-time.
Provide a single view for tasks
Business process automation decreases task time by putting all tasks for someone in one central easy-to-find location. The business process software can perform all calculations and rules-based decisions automatically within the electronic forms.
Have the right people deal with the task
This is a key benefit and efficiency gain. The business process software will route tasks to the right individuals for approval and input based on your business rules. This means that exceptions are dealt with properly and more importantly tasks don't get ignored because the person who has got them doesn't know what to do.
A further benefit is that when you define the business rules and process routing, you ensure the correct people make business decisions.
Tasks don't get lost, processes finish to completion
The administration view allows you to track and organise all the tasks of every participant in business processes. Additionally, if tasks are late, reminders are sent. Comprehensive business process automation ensures that tasks do not fall through the cracks.
Only enter data once
As BPM applications can link to both existing and custom external databases and systems you can ensure data is only ever entered once in a business process. And it's not only the business processes themselves that can link to data sources, you can expedite the entry of information and reduce errors by linking electronic forms to your databases to create look-up tables - pulling data from wherever in the organisation it exists.
Take business processes outside the firewall
Rather than have your suppliers, customer and partners call you to interact with your business processes you can choose to empower them by exposing tasks for them. This would typically be initiating a business process via a web form or having them participate in a process (such as signing off an acknowledgement) by form or email.
By using pure HTML we can build forms and queues that work on any browser platform including PDAs. Additionally - because the full client API is available - custom clients such a WAP, Java and even an SMS interface can be constructed.
Analyse, Optimise and Simulate
A BPM application records the lag time and task time for every step of every business process in your organisation. This isn't some corporate big brother exercise but the raw data needed to analyse both how effective your flow is and the actual cost of a particular process. When you're faced with questions such as "how can we increase our responsiveness " or " how many more transactions can we process before we need to increase headcount " these business process statistics are invaluable.
When you want to redesign a business process then applcations such as the Ultimus Designer or Casewise let you remodel the process and then run simulated processes through your design. For each step in the process you can define the normal lag and task times and then the software will run multiple incidents through the process. Of course life isn't predicable or regular, and so these simulation packages let you define the statistical deviation governing the rate at which incidents are introduced into the process and how each task responds.
The end result is a real-life simulation of your process, you can see where the bottlenecks are and work out the optimised flow.
If you would like to talk about how you can use BPM with your current systems then please contact us.