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2010/05/04 00:52:40

Business Process Management (BPM)

One of the management techniques based on a combination of ideology and business process management software. The article is included in the review of the BPM system in Russia

Content

Set of control cycle elements and their relationship

General information

The BPM system is originally designed to implement the principles of process business management in the company. Many information systems are implemented on the market, each of which is created in a certain way for complete management of business processes: strategy, design, implementation, control.

Most BPM systems have evolved to automate the business process. BPM systems are a central part of the Service-Oriented Architecture  SOA -. A BPM system with advanced integration tools is a kind of link between all services of a single IT solution. BPM is a necessary means of implementing the concept. SOA The main difference between BPM systems and applications of other classes is that the main object of automation in it is the business process. Based on the logic of the business process, the BPM system distributes the work flow to the participants, thus ensuring the management of the business process.

By itself, automation of business processes is not considered as a priority goal for the implementation of the system, and the calculation here is made that after the implementation of the BPM system, the company has a tool for managing business processes. This allows you to increase the performing discipline, set the necessary algorithm for the work of the company and control its correct execution, as well as start the process of continuous improvement of business processes. After all, without proper management, business processes lose their effectiveness, and this is a well-known fact.

Business process maturity levels

BPM Software Diversity

[http://www.bptrends.com/bpt/wp-content/uploads/2015-BPT-Survey-Report.pdf A BPMtrends report 2016

Business Process Analyze

One of the most successful markets for supporting tools in the field BPM is the information systems sector of the Business Process Analyze class. One way or another, the description business processes comes in most large Russian and foreign organizations. Banking telecommunication and sector, power and metallurgy, oil and gas, retail and insurance - companies from these industries use BPA, a tool for describing and regulating business processes, by internal units responsible for organizational development.

Medium and small enterprises prefer MS Visio and various free tools to draw a business process model in EPC and BPMN notation. The ARIS toolkit is in demand in the market of large companies, and only the telecommunications industry uses the Casoise tool, which has long had an industry abstract model of a telecommunications company. The expansion of the BPA market is now in the area of Enterprise Architecture, where a description of data, applications and IT infrastructure is added to the description of business processes. At the same time, very often the same tools are used to solve these architectural problems as for analyzing processes.

Business Process Management System (BPMS)

If business processes described, then according to the logic of the process control cycle, they must be automated by the appropriate tools. Based on this, workflow systems appeared that were positioned as automation tools. business processes Further, the functionality of workflow systems was expanded to support the full cycle of process management, and they became known as the Business Process Management system. For many years, analysts predicted an explosive growth of this market, but this did not happen. And despite the demand for business process description tasks and BPA tools, the scope of "clean" BPMS is still limited to the financial sector. In the telecommunications sector, process automation tasks are most often provided from the level of production systems, and in other industries automation is limited to the implementation of ERP. In fact, BPMS is in demand where a "boxed" solution is not suitable, there are a large number of customers, it is necessary to constantly change the business process and reduce its execution time. In these areas, there is no equal for specialized BPMS class systems. But focusing on the financial industry does not mean that they are not in demand in other areas. One way or another, workflow/BPMs technology is included in the systems ERP ECM of all major manufacturers. software There are "process engines" in ERP (, "," etc.), SAP1C there are in ECM (FileNet IBM , Documentum etc.), that is, it has become a standard and routine technology within the product lines of developers, and ON specialized BPMS are focused on one industry.

Process Mining

Main article: Process Mining

Of the innovative areas, Process Mining is currently developing most actively, based on the idea of ​ ​ reversing the model of business processes based on log files of information systems. The ideologist of the campaign - Wil van der Aalst, professor at Eindhoven Technical University and Queensland Technical University - has long promoted this topic at the world level, but in Russia a practical interest in Process Mining has appeared only now.

And although Gartner has not yet formed its quadrant using this technology, many software manufacturers have already created the corresponding toolkit: ARIS PPM, Futura Reflect, Fujitsu Interstage ADP, Pallas Athena ReflectOne, QPR Process Analyzer. At the same time, I would especially like to highlight the Open Source product ProM, which begins to be used for reverse recovery of business processes. And although in practice the use of Process Mining is fraught with many difficulties due to the peculiarities of existing IT, it is quite possible that after a while this particular toolkit will become widespread.

Process Intelligence

Process Mining extends Process Intelligence. In fact, this is a process approach to analyzing business indicators and an appropriate tool that allows you to calculate process indicators collected on the basis of transactional systems. And while Process Mining focuses on analyzing process logic, Process Intelligence focuses on analyzing its performance.

The process structure of the data warehouse and process approaches to their analysis have a positive effect when improving business processes. There is specialized software in this market, for example, ARIS Process Performance Manager, but in practice you can often find cases when classic Business Intelligence systems (IBM Cognos, SAP Business Object, MicroStrategy and others) are successfully configured and used by process logic.

Intelligent BPM (iBPM)

There are rumors among experts that the Gartner quadrant dedicated to BPMS will soon be renamed iBPM and will be devoted to business process management systems with "intelligent" capabilities. iBPM is now an umbrella concept that combines technologies such as BPMS, Complex Event Processing, Business Activity Monitor, Business Rules, Business Intelligence. At the same time, within the framework of iBPM, all global trends are not forgotten - business process management using mobile devices and interaction with social networks for collaboration.

A similar situation was observed when workflow systems were converted to BPMS, and therefore, with a high probability, in the near future it will be possible to observe how BPMS will smoothly turn into iBPM, while the issue of their mass use may remain open.

10 key components of iBPMs by: Gartner

  • A process orchestration engine
  • A process orchestration engine
  • A model-driven composition environment
  • Content interaction management
  • Human interaction management - interaction of people involved in the process
  • Connectivity - Integration with people, systems, data, and metrics
  • Active Analytics - Execution Monitoring, Action and Change Analysis
  • On-demand analytics - analysis-based decision support
  • Business rule management
  • Management and administration - control and management of technical aspects
  • A process component registry/repository - reuse of process components

Gartner defines BPM as a management discipline that uses business processes as assets that directly impact enterprise operations, helping to achieve operational excellence and business flexibility. To support the implementation of process management in companies, specialized information systems have appeared on the IT market, in which it is the business process that has become the main object for automation.

First, these systems were called workflow, then their functionality was expanded by automating the full cycle of process management to the Business Process Management Suite (BPMs), and recently, by expanding the analytical functionality of BPMs, a new term Intelligent Business Process Management Suites (iBPMs) appeared. This evolution of the development of BPMs led to the emergence of serious functionality in terms of rapid automation of processes with complex logic, and the possibility of subsequent rapid changes.

However, if process management as a management concept is in demand in many companies operating in a competitive environment, then specialized BPM systems are more often used in financial companies, because it is in them that processes must be adaptive to maintain competitiveness. "For 2006-2007, we analyzed many technologies and systems and opted for BPM technology. We saw the main value in its wide application not only in the field of customer service, but also in the automation of internal processes, - said Alexander Trapezin, director of the department of technological solutions at Temirbank. - The goal was not to replace technologies such as CRM and ERP. The goal was to manage business processes that use the capabilities of these technologies and achieve a synergistic effect. "

If you analyze the Gartner quadrant dedicated to BPMs, or in the new iBPMs transcription, you can find many players for whom BPMs is the main product. It is their systems that most quickly become owners of new functionality. According to Gartner, these include: Appian, Bosch Software Innovations, DST Systems, OpenText, Pegasystems, PNMsoft, Vitria and Whitestein. The second group of players consists of platform vendors, for whom BPMs are only part of their product line. These manufacturers benefit, as a rule, due to strong integration and developed sales channels. Gartner includes Cordys, IBM, Oracle, Software AG and Tibco Software. At the same time, many of the BPMs manufacturers have not yet been represented on the Russian market.

Subject-oriented BPM (SBPM)

The elimination of the "rigidity" of BPMS in terms of routing works is devoted to new developments that appear on the market, one of which is subject-oriented business process management - Subject-oriented BPM. In SBPM technology, the focus of automation is on the interaction of employees who transmit messages to each other. In fact, we are talking about the transfer of the information system to the participants of the business process, after which each of them describes in it all the actions he takes within the framework of the business process, and the information system monitors their consistency.

Thus, without drawing a single business process model, a list of possible actions agreed with each other is formalized around each performer. And then all this begins to be performed in real time. In fact, it implies the automation of the business process by business forces - an idea that has long been promoted by manufacturers of information systems. The approach is interesting, but not unambiguous - the solution must still be tested in practice in order to prove its advantages.

Adaptive Case Management (ACM)

Adaptive Case Management is another new concept based on case management. A case is a situation that requires a set of actions to get an acceptable result or achieve a goal. The case focuses on the subject on which the actions are performed and expands on gradually emerging circumstances, while the information on the case is a complete collection of case-related documents of different formats passing through the business process. ACM adherents declare that systems of this class will easily absorb the functionality of BPMS, but, as they say, "the future will show."

ACM technology should combine BPMS, Enterprise Content Management, Business Analyze, and User Experience. In fact, the ACM class system is an ideal universal tool in which it will be convenient to process various data according to different algorithms and taking into account the specifics of users. However, there is still an active search in this area, and many developers in one form or another are trying to achieve all the above advantages in one tool, but in practice there are still no full-fledged ACM solutions.

Social BPM

The most odious trend in the field of BPM is Social BPM, and here there are more ideas and concepts than working tools. The emergence of ideas of a network community and interaction between performers, the transition from a pushing management system to a pulling one, the introduction of competition inside the company and inside the business process, ratings of performers, cloud implementation and mass use based on social networks. All these innovative approaches to management are still at the stage of discussion and conceptual projects. But some elements can already be seen in various software products and cloud services, but no one has yet been able to collect all these ideas into a single whole.

Time will tell which tools will be in demand and which will not find their consumer. It is possible that something radically new will soon appear, because the volume of changes in the market is growing, which means that we have a chance to see new approaches to process management and tools for their implementation.

BPM cycle

It is based BPM on the idea of ​ ​ a continuous control cycle, which includes:

  • definition of development goals
  • modeling of factors determining the achievement of these limiter goals
  • planning of actions leading to the achievement of the set goals
  • continuous monitoring to monitor the status of KPIs and their deviation from the plan
  • analysis of the achieved results, which makes it possible to better understand the nature of the prerequisite for effectiveness
  • reporting that helps managers make further decisions

Targeted Automation Processes

As mentioned earlier, the purpose of BPM systems is to automate any business processes, but the maximum effect is achieved when used in processes with a high frequency of execution and complex logic. Examples are:

  • telecommunication services connection processes
  • retail lending processes at the bank
  • processes of technical connection of the end consumer in the power, the process of obtaining insurance in the insurance company
  • the process of creating a purchase order in logistics  , etc.

BPM systems as the most effective management tool have proven themselves in such business processes.

Process-Oriented Architecture (POA)

Core Enterprise Architectures

  • Process Architecture
  • Business architecture
  • System architecture
  • Data architecture

Principles:

  • Autonomy
  • Interchangeability
  • Repeatability
  • Incoherence
  • Collecting

Architecture and Analytics

Any BPM system implies modular construction and usually includes:

  • graphical functions designed to visualize, describe, and analyze processes.
  • Job execution server (workflow server), the primary server on which BPM-controlled processes run. The server monitors the status of each process and business events within that process.
  • operational tools that perform the functions of changes during the process, for example, managing work lists and work priorities.
  • Monitoring and control tools: The monitoring module shows the degree or stage of completion of the process and its conditions.

The BPM system has two levels of business intelligence. At the first level is the business activity monitoring tool - Business Activity Monitoring (Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)). Here, through the analysis of the key indicators of the process performance in real time, the business process is controlled as well as the response to important events. At the second level, automated business processes are analyzed  - process BI (Business Intelligent). The analysis of the business process is carried out for its continuous improvement.

Adaptive BPM Systems

Currently, the speed of changes in the business process has increased (and continues to increase) so much that IT solutions become an obstacle to the development of companies. Therefore, today, systems that allow you to make changes most easily and quickly receive serious advantages.

The adaptability of the BPM system is that there is no need for programming and easy configuration of the business process during its primary automation. An example is the Ultiumus Adaptive BPM Suite, which allows you to automate the business process with business analysts, while changing business logic is possible without the participation of an IT specialist.

BPM System Selection Criteria

Gartner analysts suggest choosing BPM systems using the following indicators:

  • support for human-to-human tasks and end-user interface convenience
  • support for organizational structure and role groups
  • possibility of adjustment of tasks, operational intervention in the process and processing of exceptions
  • the ability to control the logic of the process from the user's workplace
  • Ease of administration
  • presence of graphical functions for development of business process models
  • Support for required architecture and standards
  • performance and scalability
  • ability to service numerous, long-lasting and branched processes
  • a clear configuration interface and the ability to minimize IT involvement in implementation and support
  • the ability to inform in real time on deviations in process indicators and abnormal situations
  • SOA support
  • presence of business process templates on the basis of which new processes can be developed
  • darkness

In principle, many BPM systems are already so easy to set up that the automation of the process can be controlled by a business specialist or business analyst. This allows you to speed up both implementation and change processes. By eliminating information gaps between business professionals and IT, you can achieve a serious increase in the impact of using BPM systems.

Business Process Management Implementation

BPMs are implemented much faster than ERP systems due to the fact that in most cases business process automation is independent of each other. This makes it possible to quickly automate the main business processes of the company. Thus, a small business process can be automated in a day, however, for large projects, the implementation period can last up to three months.

Usually, automation of business processes goes through the creation and approval of a terms of reference for automation. But in some cases, the rate of change is quite high, and it becomes necessary to use less formalized approaches, such as applying the principles of extreme programming, when a business user, together with a consultant, configure the system on their own, involving an IT specialist only to solve integration problems. This approach reduces the implementation time of the BPM system by several times, which often allows you to automate the process in less than a month.

When implementing business process management systems, there are typical problems. The first problem is related to the coordination of opinions of all participants in the automated business process. In practice, this means that there may be cases when the negotiation time can be an order of magnitude longer than the automation time itself. The second problem with the implementation of a BPM system may be the need for compatibility with existing applications from various suppliers or even in-house development. In this case, as in the previous one, the time spent on integration can also exceed the time of automation itself.

Main costs

The amount of investments in the integration of the BPM system into the enterprise depends primarily on automated business processes and the number of client locations.There are systems, the starting cost of which is from 30 to 50 thousand dollars. If we consider a large organization, then here we can already talk about increasing the present amount by an order of magnitude - about 500 thousand dollars.

There are enough developments on the market worth less than 10 thousand dollars, but you should not take these systems seriously, since in practice their productivity is negligible or absent at all.

Implementation effect

According to a study by the analytical agency Gartner, the implementation of BPM systems can significantly save financial resources. A survey conducted by the agency showed that 95 % of respondents had successful BPM implementation projects. The average return on investment was 15% , and 55% had an income of about $100-500 thousand from each project

Advantages

The main advantage from the introduction of business process management systems is the fact that the company begins to work clearly according to a given algorithm, the performing discipline increases, and all this turns the organization into a well-functioning mechanism. First of all, the business process is accelerated, the ground appears for using new optimal business practices and benchmarking of business processes. The components of this perspective are:

  • consolidation of information from different applications and data stores in the same system in an easy-to-view and analyze form
  • financial applications for budgeting, planning, modeling and analysis with the most efficient functionality
  • a unified management system that unites the efforts of all planning and forecasting specialists
  • significant reduction in the time required to collect data from subsidiaries and affiliates
  • a more complete understanding of the company's activities by attracting a large number of different indicators

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