Business Process Management
What are Business Processes? What is Business Process Management?
Business Processes are the collection of structured and related tasks or activities that aim to produce a specific goal or outcome. Businesses usually have many processes in execution simultaneously that have typically evolved over time towards the goal of effectively meeting customer needs.
Business Process Management is a systematic approach to understanding, documenting, analyzing and improving business processes. It has been found that although some businesses can operate without formalizing their processes, becoming more rigorous in this area is a stepping stone to higher performance.
Certainly large businesses have critical needs to understand how their business runs and how to optimize their internal operations so that they become more efficient and effective in meeting customer needs. And businesses that are growing will find that there comes a time where relying on the individuals in your organization to keep things in order is no longer sufficient. As complexity and size outstrip the informal processes that have been effective to date, it becomes wise to invest in understanding how the business functions, writing these function down, understanding where inefficiencies lie and where errors are occurring, and investing in changes to continuously improve quality, reduce costs and simultaneously improve customer satisfaction.
Welcome to Business Process Management…
SHARPER COUNSEL currently has five articles on Business Process Management:
1) Business Process Tutorial — an overview of business processes and business process management to provide a general introduction and to introduce key vocabulary.
2) Getting Started With Business Process Management — a discussion of the need for a clear management stance to pursue business process management and the need to accomplish a “Business Process Inventory” to understand what is in place already.
3) Understanding Your Business Processes — a discussion that moves from the requirement of a Business Process Inventory to be organized into a “Business Process Architecture” suitable for the type of business under consideration as a key enabler for follow on detail work.
4) Enhancing Your Business Capabilities — once the business process inventory is organized into a suitable architecture, it is important to attach “Key Process Indicators” to the processes/architecture so that follow on results are measurable in terms of factors important to the business and to serve to identify appropriate start points for detail process work solving real process issues.
5) The Consultant’s Role in Business Process Management — a description of the role consultant can provide when pursuing Business Process Management that extends from leading the inventory, selection of an architecture, identification and mapping of key process indicators, and facilitating the work to solve real business issues.
Enjoy, enjoy…and don’t forget to call us if you need support — 800.280.2452
If you’d like to print a nice handout of the five articles bound with some cover material and some worksheets for using in your own business process work, please follow this link:
Business Process Management Study Guide
