Business processes are the work that organizations do. This work involves:

• Human and system tasks and activities
• Structured and unstructured effort
• Activities that span business units, departments and functions
• Satisfying multiple stakeholders — inside and outside the enterprise
• Long-running processes
• Constantly changing business environments and rules
• And more...

Business Process Management (BPM) is a management discipline that treats processes as assets (VISIBILITY) and contributes directly to the enterprise performance (ACCOUNTABILITY) by driving operational excellence and business agility (ADAPTABILITY).

When adopting a BPM strategy correctly and effectively, organizations usually see big increases in process efficiencies, which, in return yield huge gains. Many organizations realize a return on investment within one year of implementing.

While implementing BPM with a concentration on customer service, one must first begin a regiment of focusing on four main areas of the enterprise:

• Communication
• Education
• Accountability

• Corporate Culture

Communication

The goal of improving corporate communication is to find effective media to disseminate information and ensure that all employees have the same knowledge of policies and procedures that are consistent in performing their job functions.

Education

Assess the current corporate training. What is the current training strategy? Does it match the strategic business plan and assess the training functions so it is aligned with the organization to achieve business goals and objectives? Does corporate training use the silo approach, meaning is it removed from HR, knowledge management, competitive intelligence, educational assistance (degree programs) and benchmarking activities? If so, the silo approach keeps solutions from being integrated into the strategic business plan. How should training effectiveness be measured or what are the specific outcomes to be achieved?

The education and training process begins with top and middle management, which is then disseminated down to the staff. Without sponsorship from top management, the progression of corporate learning will not succeed.

Accountability

It is management’s responsibility to set goals and performance standards for employees. Management needs to define what information to track, keeping in mind that processes may be manual, or disjointed, and what the metric goals are. Accountability, done correctly, should result in personal growth and greater job satisfaction. This generates a feeling self-worth and, consequently, higher productivity and morale.

Corporate Culture

Corporate culture, or organizational culture, describes the beliefs, values and attitudes of an organization; the values and views shared by people in a corporation that control the way people interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization. By addressing communication, education and accountability, you may already be addressing a change in the culture of the organization.

So Then, Why BPM?

Organizations that already have a good corporate culture along with good communication and training are already disciplined. Employees may already be held accountable, but perhaps not empowered. So what’s next? “Let’s look at our current processes and focus on the customer experience.”

As with the above areas of concentration, BPM is also a discipline. As I have stated many times before, installing software does not “magically transform your company.” Business Process Management is about first understanding the concept, ruthlessly exploring all facets of the processes and working on making them as efficient as possible. With process improvements and efficiencies implemented with BPM, organizations can see cost savings almost immediately.

Implemented correctly, BPM can:

• Process Centricity. Coalesces business and IT activities and manages the actions and behaviors of employees and technology.
• Help Eliminate the Paper Clutter. Every document coming in is captured electronically as soon as possible. Whether it is mailed, faxed or electronically transmitted.
• Apply Business Rules to control the process. Ideally, business rules external from the process can provide greater flexibility and agility. The rules executed with the workflow ensure that work is executed per policy.
• Continuous Process Improvement. Minimizes the time required to complete a process, minimizes human error, enhances productivity and streamlines resource utilization.
• Real-Time Process Management. Management can obtain real-time views of processes, work in progress, work waiting to be processed, the time each task is taking as well as any delays and bottlenecks. Management can implement Continuous Improvement on existing processes more easily.
• Integrate with Internal Systems. Data necessary for processing, such as account information in a CRM or financial data in an accounting system, can be used in the process.
• Integrate with External Systems by retrieving data from other external sources.
• Work Anywhere. Web-based BPM systems can allow anyone to work from anywhere. All data and documents are available all the time.