Expanding Your View of Business Process Management
the process for future reference. But collaboration is not just for process exceptions; there are many collaborative processes, such as clinical trial management in the life sciences industry, which have not previously been able to take advantage of BPM to improve process efficiency and employee productivity.
Processes Need Information Too
BPM-run processes must be able to access relevant information to properly perform their various tasks and activities. Because such information often includes structured data as well as unstructured content—images, emails, documents and more—the ability to handle both is crucial to BPM effectiveness.
Consider an insurance claims process, which typically begins when an insurer's employee or agent—or, possibly, the customer, acting through a Web-based electronic form—enters data to trigger the creation of a new claims process. More data is pulled from other systems and data sources, validating the customer. From this point on, unstructured content vital to the claim's resolution is added (digital pictures from the claims adjuster, repair estimate documents from external vendors, emails between insurance employees and external parties involved in the claim, etc.). This combination of structured and unstructured information must be managed and made available throughout the process, as well as tied directly to the claim for recordkeeping and compliance purposes—even after the claim has been settled.
With the convergence of content and business process management, a new breed of BPM offerings has been created to handle the complexities presented by unstructured content. Why just store process information (structured and unstructured) when content-aware BPM suites can enable your organization to manage it based on the context and needs of your processes?
Performance Monitoring
Without performance monitoring, success is a gamble. You may have created the perfect process and it is running in production. But is it really perfect? Does it meet the goals and objectives for which it exists? Are specific activities causing performance issues—and if so, how quickly are they being identified and resolved?
Business activity monitoring (BAM) is another technology that evolved separately from BPM but is now being offered in varying degrees by a number of BPM suites. BAM can monitor process performance in real time and provide easily understood, actionable information through graphical dashboards, alerts and historical reports. BAM enables you to quickly detect problems by first identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) within the process, defining appropriate thresholds and then monitoring the processes for threshold violations. More important, thanks to alerts and root-cause analysis tools, performance issues can be readily understood and corrected.
With BAM your organization can identify and react quickly to process issues while gathering actual performance data that can be fed back into analysis. The result: a never-ending loop of process optimization.
As your business needs evolve—due to new corporate objectives, emerging competitive threats, unforeseen customer demands and more—how do you make sure your organization's processes properly and quickly adapt?
BPM suites excel at managing processes throughout their lifecycles. In fact, to get maximum value from its BPM suite, an organization should use it to take a process from initial design and analysis through operational execution and monitoring—then leverage that experience to make iterative refinements that improve process design and function over time.
As organizations first design and implement more efficient processes, then evolve those processes to meet changing business requirements, groups across the enterprise are more likely to meet their individual goals as well as roll those up into overarching corporate objectives.
Process optimization requires an integrated environment that can capably manage and hand off the following lifecycle stages:
- Analysis—business-level process discovery and modeling, analytics and simulation;
- Deployment—technical implementation tools and process UI layout;
- Execution—orchestration of human- and system-based activities as well as system-to-system integration; and
- Monitoring—real-time alerts, operational dashboards and business performance reports.
As noted previously, process optimization depends on BPM's ability to link the monitoring and analysis stages of the process lifecycle. This linkage enables your organization to bring together recent performance information, historical trends and future projections to refine initial process design and continually improve ongoing activities.
Business process management suites extend core BPM process automation functionality. The best BPM suites enable your organization to discover, understand and analyze processes in a collaborative design environment; manage both human- and system-based activities; manage both structured data and unstructured content within the process; provide real-time performance monitoring; and enable full-process lifecycle management.
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is a leader in products, services and solutions for information management and storage that help organizations extract the maximum value from their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle. Information about EMC's business process management offering can be found at
www.software.emc.com/bpm.
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