Automating processes through business process management (BPM) solutions is not where the benefits of the solution end. Because the processes people use internally change rapidly, the BPM solution should adapt its processes accordingly. The ability of the BPM solution to adapt to the ever-changing environment within organizations provides the advantage of delivering increased productivity, and faster cycle times with fewer errors.
BPM solutions generally follow one of two approaches: human-centric, or system-intensive. BPM suites that have to deal with changing processes and work habits are often solutions that have high human-centric involvement. Human-centric BPM involves work done by people while interacting heavily with underlying databases, business applications, and documents. Human-centric systems thus focus on processes such as claims processing, mortgage approvals, and customer service. System-intensive processes, on the other hand, often involve high-volume, repetitive transactions which require no or minimal human interaction. These transactions take place between different applications. This article focuses on the human-centric BPM solution, and how it adapts to process changes.
Automating Processes
Automated processes represent the first step within BPM, and provide the primary business cost savings. The initial legwork captures and documents the inputs and outputs of the current workflows within the organization. After documenting the processes, organizations should analyze the processes to determine which should be eliminated, which should be automated as is, and which should be reengineered to improve processes and workflows within the organization.
Describing the processes in detail, rather than automating them, is the challenge. Discovering all the rules, flows, and exceptions takes a long time and much effort, resulting in delays to deployment. Even though the automation aspect is not trivial, once the processes are defined (together with the rules, roles, events, conditions, and scenarios), process automation is relatively straightforward. The difficulty comes afterwards, when the solution becomes part of the organization's culture and its people's habits. Processes need the ability to adapt to change, so in order for a BPM solution to fulfill these requirements, it should incorporate flexible out-of-the-box functionality that responds to business agility and environmental changes.
Automating processes often requires programming skills. BPM solutions already have built-in, out-of-the-box functions and features that enable the automation of processes, and these simple workflows require minimal technical skills, which enables business analysts to create workflows without interference of information technology (IT) departments. This results in accelerated deployment within the organizations.
Figure 1 shows how BPM reduces inefficiency and business costs, resulting in savings. The vertical axis shows the cost of doing business, and the horizontal axis represents time. Initially the business cost is high, but after the automation process and the deployment of these processes, the business costs will drop significantly, due to better process efficiency, which in turn will result in direct savings.
Figure 1.
Source: Ultimus Inc.
There are complex processes that take more time to develop, to optimize, and to execute within the organization. A longer development time for complex processes, and the "analysis paralysis" of the long discovery period will lead to slow deployment of these specific processes within the organization, resulting in a longer adaptation phase and a longer time frame before the savings are realized, as figure 2 demonstrates.
Figure 2.
Source: Ultimus Inc.
What happens after the deployment when the processes are in place and the BPM solution is implemented? While BPM deployments typically take less than six months, the life cycle of the BPM solution after deployment will be much longer. Organizations will need to see how actual users will adapt to these changes, so the time after deployment becomes a significant element of the BPM
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