Management Consulting
Business Process Management – the Foundation of Long-Term Business Success
Business success these days is influenced by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity – or VUCA for short. In a world dominated by VUCA, changes are part of everyday life. This means that business processes are subject to constant change.
Businesses that wish to perform successfully when the demands of the market and customers are volatile need to make their processes flexible and structure them in a way that embeds targets and strategy within the company effectively. Documented process standards and transparency along with effective and efficient process management are the basis for controlling complexity and operating preventively. This, in turn, provides the basis for business-process optimization.
What Is Business Process Management?
Business process management is a way of managing business with a focus on processes. It is a holistic approach to process and organizational design. It allows a company to capture, design, document, measure, monitor, control, optimize, and automate its business processes and workflows.
Business process management ideally encompasses all operational processes and includes all roles and responsibilities that are necessary to manage a company efficiently.
How Does Business Process Management Work?
BPM works based on a control cycle which includes five key tasks.
The motto of “process follows strategy – systems enabling processes” represents the basic idea for all activities.
- Analyze
Existing business processes are analyzed in detail during this stage of the BPM life cycle. The processes that are identified strategically or operationally are evaluated based on their process maturity and link to the business strategy. The same applies to the system landscape in these processes. The stage concludes by defining potential and actual areas for action. - Design & Modeling
The goal of this stage is to determine standardization practices, BPM tools, and BPM rules; to model optimal processes; and to define KPIs for measuring process performance. Process reengineering and improvement are two elementary approaches for modeling. - Detailed Design & Implementation
This stage involves identifying fundamental requirements based on relevant findings, planning implementation, and the implementation itself in relation to the organization, systems, and employees that are needed for the business processes to run smoothly. - Optimization
The objective of this stage is to examine and implement continuous mechanisms for raising the performance of processes that have been realized and for continuously improving this performance.
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Monitoring & Management
This stage aims to establish near-real-time process monitoring by linking data related to business processes with end-to-end monitoring and performance.
process, and companies need to continuously move through the individual stages to perform the right tasks correctly all the times. This only works when managers oversee the changes with holistic change management. Optimized business processes and IT systems will add value when employees are empowered to act within the new structures.
How Can Companies Harness the Benefits of BPM?
- When implemented correctly, business process management can improve a company’s cost structure with rapidly adaptable, flexible, and transparent processes and optimized information flows.
- In doing so, it creates resilient, agile processes that can be monitored and evaluated at any time and adapted to changing conditions thanks to near-real-time data collection and a clear understanding of roles and duties.
- What’s more, this increases the satisfaction of your customers.
- The maturity model that Ingenics has specially designed for strategic business process management provides orientation for this.
It describes four maturity levels with clearly defined and fully separate stages which, in combination with fundamental lean principles, lead to the highest level of maturity in successful process management and enable continuous improvement:
Control Cycle & Model for BPM Projects
The Business Process Management Maturity Model
BPM Level 1: Standard
At level one, process standards are defined, described, and made accessible to everyone at the company. Existing processes, workflows, and business processes are visualized and described on a process map, including with defined interfaces and role allocation.
BPM Level 2: Transparency
At this stage, the actual process status within the company is measurable and can be compared with the desired target status by using defined key performance indicators. Level 2 is characterized by having transparency surrounding end-to-end processes and the degree to which the target and actual statuses overlap and to which their figures correlate with the company’s targets. The use of process mining tools is an efficient way of performing this data-driven analysis.
BPM Level 3: Automation
Thanks to the transparency around the target and actual statuses, a foundation for optimization and automation can now be built upon it. Automating business processes does not have to involve a fully comprehensive system solution or infrastructure development. Even simple automation with available resources, like using routines, workflows, or robotic process automation (RPA) creates direct benefits.
BPM Level 4: Prediction
At the highest level of BPM development, companies can control their processes efficiently with end-to-end performance management thanks to near-real-time process monitoring. Variances between target and actual statuses can be uncovered and analyzed in close to real time. Future problems and developments can be detected at an early stage using prediction scenarios and alert systems. This enables a proactive response to events and deviations from targets.
We Help You with Your End-to-End Process Management
Process mining and other digital solutions can act as a quick fix for clients; however “plug & play” solutions do not exist. Solutions require clearly defined target processes so that deviations and waste can be made transparent.
Accordingly, every BPM project starts with the analog process, organizational structure, and people behind it.
Our consultants have supported companies in manufacturing for decades with fast and targeted implementation of business-process management and with increasing their BPM maturity.
It begins with an analysis of the current process map and with process optimization, and ranges from choosing and implementing suitable business process management software, creating mechanisms for the continuous improvement process, and process monitoring approaches to training employees and overseeing the change process.
As part of this, clients benefit from our expertise in process design and optimization, in organizational development, and in digital transformation.