Optimizing BPM to Ensure Competitive Edge

Business cycles are more compressed. Markets are changing more rapidly and in less predictable ways. Factors such as economic swings, value chain dynamics, regulations, and compliance issues mean that processes that worked for your company yesterday may not be the answer today. The key is to see the impact of the changes to an organization's business faster, create a new approach quickly and then act on it more nimbly than your competition. In this light, the goal of the BPM cannot be to determine and implement the single most perfect process for an organization, as there is no finite, perfect endstate to achieve. Instead, BPM should enable companies to gain insight into their processes in real-time and change them (in many instances automatically) more frequently than their competitors in order to create greater value. Optimized BPM is the enabler—a technology solution that emphasizes the continuous optimization of the select operational processes that most directly affect corporate performance goals.

Optimized BPM
Optimized BPM enables organizations to establish goals, define strategies, and set objectives for improving particular operational processes that have significant impact on corporate performance—in real time. The key advantage of optimization over traditional BPM technologies is the ability to both address the real-time optimization of individual processes "in flight" and identify strategic changes to business processes to drive long-term value and cost savings. This dual mission of optimization drives efficiency improvements as well as increased process effectiveness and alignment with business process goals and performance indicators. The focus is on business processes that directly affect the metrics of corporate success.

For years organizations have used various tools and business-intelligence techniques to analyze data for completed business processes and to judge the effectiveness of their transactions. While these approaches have gradually improved over the years—from using data that is days and weeks old, to nearreal- time information, for example— the fact remains that managers are still analyzing business results in retrospect. An even greater challenge is the inherent gap between this data and the very processes that must be altered to improve results. As organizations strive for more effective and efficient operations, they are increasingly interested in gaining more visibility and control over in-progress business transactions while eliminating the disconnect between analysis/planning and implementation. Going beyond real-time visibility into the work-in-progress, in order to understand the business conditions that affect processes, is now a top priority. Having the capability to act on these insights in real time is also becoming imperative. Applying business intelligence functions (e.g., correlation, aggregation, time-series data analysis, predictive forecasting) to this data in the context of the process enables operational managers to make better operational decisions and potentially take corrective action before transactions complete.

Combining business activity monitoring and analysis capabilities with business process management translates into business optimization: allowing organizations to transcend reactive tactics and engage in strategic, analytical and proactive management.

Organizations are able to: 

• Capture business event information and the transient state of businesscritical data as work progresses, helping them analyze why business objectives are not being met;
• Combine simulation capabilities with historical data, in order to predict or anticipate business events that will positively or negatively affect the process;
• Achieve an end-to-end view of business processes and a greater ability to monitor all business activity—independent of the system where the events occur;
• Monitor events that occur within an organization's business processes and correlate the relationship between independent or isolated events;
• Increase visibility, control and the ability to react to changes; and
• Ultimately increase their company's agility by providing early visibility into problems with critical business processes and the ability to alter them.

BPM: Past Present and Future
Many have suggested that BPM has actually been around for years—and this is in fact partially true: BPM is a January 2006 S7 convergence of a number of existing technologies and approaches. Its primary roots are in the process management capabilities of workflow tools, but it also includes capabilities that are derived from document management, process modeling, analytics, rules management, collaboration applications and application integration. However, BPM is not just a sum of these parts. It brings together all these technology elements into a single platform that manages the lifecycle of a process starting from business goals and definition, through deployment, execution, measurement, change and redeployment.

BPM provides a complete view of all the activities necessary to execute a particular business process including the applications, people and data involved. While initially the emphasis was on eliminating paper, and was focused largely on document routing and workflow to gain efficiencies, the bar has been raised (as well as the potential ROI) to also include the management and automation of the work and processes themselves—requiring feedback loops for process optimization.

According to many BPM experts, the future of BPM equates to the management of the processes that support a business transaction/event from the beginning to end, while applying the policies and rules needed to support an organization's business model at a point in time. This translates into dynamic modeling based on real-time data and a direct link between process analysis/planning and implementation. This is a much different BPM than one that is linking human-to human activities with system activities—it requires far greater capabilities that support round-trip engineering operating in a real-time fashion. The benefits for taking this approach are significant: realtime visibility and integration between business strategy and execution gives organizations control over in-progress business transactions and ultimately far greater business effectiveness.

Workflow vs. BPM vs. Optimization
The more sophisticated BPM solutions provide tools for analyzing and modeling processes that enable business analysts to leverage graphical process design to examine process flow and create new business process models. The process execution engine manages the defined processes engaging applications and triggering task assignments for workers involved. Processes are tracked (completion monitoring, exception scenarios and so on) and analyzed post completion. The key advantage of optimization is the real-time nature of process assessment: typical BPM analysis is like driving your car while only looking through the rear-view mirrors, while optimized BPM enables evaluation and change with in-progress business transactions. Rapid analysis of likely scenarios and the support of rapid responses are made possible. Automated adjustments may be made to resource allocation, based on service-level goals or other performance metrics. Fundamentally, optimization goes beyond automating how people work to automating how people manage.

Optimization Critical to BPM Success
As organizations are enabled to move from managing business processes to managing business process lifecycles their processes are now closed-loop: business objectives, strategic planning, process modeling, process execution, application management, content management and business analytics are tied together and can interact freely. This interaction among all of the discrete elements of BPM takes advantage of feedback loops for change management and incremental optimization of business processes. There is no longer a gap between strategy and business objectives with process implementation: organizations can ensure that the many touch points—such as process goal definition and process execution support— drive key business objectives. They gain the control of their operations, and are able to manage their process lifecycle from end-to-end. 

---

Global 360, Inc. is a leading provider of Business Process Management and Optimization solutions for Global 2000 organizations. With over two decades of experience, Global 360 provides organizations with a competitive edge by automating, measuring and improving resource-intensive business processes across different communities, including customers, employees and partners. Building on our strength in financial services, government and insurance, Global 360 empowers sites for more than 2,000 customers in 134 countries. Global 360, Inc. is headquartered in Texas with operations in North America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim. For more information about Global 360's BPM solutions, please call 1-214-520-1660 or visit the company web site at (www.global360.com)

Next steps
For more information on Global 360's recent addition of the Business Optimization Server to G360 BPM solution, please see the following resources at www.global360.com:

(1.) Whitepaper, "Business Optimization: Critical to BPM Success."
(2.) Webcast, "The Road Ahead for BPM in 2006" featuring Gartner's Janelle Hill and co-sponsored by BPM Institute.
(3.) Datasheet and solution brief, Business Optimization Server at http:// www.global360.com/products/bos/
(4.) Customized Business Optimization Server Demo: 831-338-2791