Business Process Management (BPM) is about breaking down intra-organisational barriers by creating visibility of how your business operates – across functions, roles, systems, and data.
A BPM Discipline is a critical capability in the modern world because it enables both control and change in what is an increasingly dynamic and competitive environment.
However, Process Models or Process Mining investigations are not inherently useful; if no one looks at them, or they lack accuracy or the requisite detail then they do not support the organisation in any practical way and instead become a resource drain.
BPM is only valuable when you are clear on how you will use the capability to support the organisation – i.e. the BPM-enabled service you will provide. There are two primary categories for these services: Understanding & Control – managing how the organisation operates today, and Transformation – shaping how the organisation will operate in the future.
Understanding & control BPM services – managing how the organisation operates today
Basic Process Mapping tools (e.g. Visio) enable you to visualise a process but they lack the sophistication to assign underlying detail or support effective collaboration. This means that they can be used as a short-term or project-based solution to provide visibility of a process (e.g. for an immediate, small scale change project) but the assets will not be reusable outside of the context of their immediate usage.
There is an emerging range of AI-enabled Process Mapping tools which support the creation of generic content using a generative AI engine. Many of these tools however still lack the sophisticated attribute management, reporting and collaboration features which are mandatory for enterprise scale BPM. AI-generated models can be a powerful tool, especially in creating a first pass draft, but also must be treated with caution because process inaccuracies can generate disconnect between business and BPM.
Process Mining-only platforms are superb at generating visibility of how your processes are performing today; from throughput times to process variations and potential compliance risks, a data-driven view of your organisation is essential to understanding your business. However, the socialisation of this information becomes a challenge. Process Mining Investigations and Dashboards can be overawing for business users, and this will prevent wide-spread adoption. Also, it can represent yet another source of information for the business, creating a further login for users to remember (or, unfortunately, forget). To fully embed data-driven visibility into your organisation, you should be embedding critical KPIs and measures from Process Mining into day-to-day operations. This can mean a range of things, from overlaying into procedures/processes through to including KPIs into your employee’s performance plans. Linking Process Mining and Process Modelling generates further synergies such as unifying the access point, simplifying the information for the user, and will driving greater BPM adoption.
A full BPM suite encompasses a BPM repository tool (modelling), Process Mining, publishing/governance capabilities; they may also include Task Mining, Workflow Automation Enterprise Architecture and Customer Journey modelling capabilities. To get the most out of these modules, they must be integrated. This range of capabilities enables a range of services beyond those previously stated. At the entry level, it enables the digitalisation of all of you Standard Operating Procedures and Detailed Work Instructions as Process Models. Additional information can be assigned at the overall process model level or to specific tasks, with customisable fields and reporting to meet your organisation specific standards. Strong publishing controls, ideally enabled by a governance workflow engine, then ensure you are publicising only the most recent and accurate content. These governance workflow engines can further enable model maintenance through comment monitoring and versioning/updates.
A commonplace challenge today is building ownership and accountability in the organisation for change at the levels beyond the Head of Functions. BPM, when properly established, addresses this through embedding Process Ownership into the organisation. This means that the responsibility for how a process functions sits within the business, with the associated accountability for performance and change. This challenges the typical bottleneck around Heads of Function and delegates decision making in a controlled manner.
Risk Management often sits siloed in an organisation, with broad organisational awareness of risk being a critical challenge. A complete BPM suite enables the tagging of Risks and Control to your operational Processes. This not only creates superior visibility of you risks and control, but also promotes risk ownership (aligned with process ownership and task responsibility as driven by the model). Further the reporting features in most leading BPM tools enable rapid risk reporting across your organisation, identifying involved roles and processes.
Quality management is also similarly served by an effective BPM tool. For example, ISO9001 requirements can be tagged against those processes which prove your organisation’s adherence to them. This again creates operational visibility and ownership of quality requirements. Contemporary reporting capabilities also drastically shorten the preparation time for quality audits by extracting an up to date and comprehensive audit report.
Business Impact Assessments can be created instantaneously with modern BPM tools because BPM repositories track Business Objects (e.g. systems, roles) usage across all processes. This enables reporting of their usage/impact across the organisation.
Summary:
- Process mapping only – good in a short-term project context but does not deliver recurring value.
- Process Modelling:
- Attribute capture and reporting – required to deliver SOPs, ISO Accreditations, and Risk Management.
- Collaboration and governance – required to ensure accurate, adopted content.
- Generative AI – can support accelerated process definition but it induces a risk of the non-organisation specific processes causing confusion.
- Process Mining – great at tracking performance but business adoption can be a challenge when not embedded into your operational processes.
Transformation – shaping how the organisation will operate in the future
Modern digital transformation can take various forms. Improvement is no longer built from “brown-paper” exercises, nor do ad-hoc automated workflows consistently provide adequate returns to justify the technical debt they impose. Instead, data-driven cross-functional thinking is required to deliver effective change.
Process Mining alone provides excellent visibility of process performance. To deliver improvement, you must then be able to examine the areas highlighted as problematic. Task Mining is a nascent but increasingly important technology in this space. It can generate massive volumes of data and tools are increasingly developing the nuance to arrange this in ways which provide the context required to identify specific actions and define changes. However, this is still not always feasible, especially where there are highly variable roles and systems spawl. One of the most effective ways to deliver change from Process Mining is to pair it with Process Modelling. The models can define and refine the current and future state of a process, engaging both people and data to shape this. Further, with advanced BPM suites you can simulate planned future state processes to assess efficacy and build business cases for change.
Process Mining enables the easy identification of areas with high potential to drive Standardisation because it will identify under and over performers for a specific process area. You can gamify this performance within your business units by creating visibility of it. Again, the benefit of having an integrated modelling platform is critical here because you can lift the critical competitive KPIs from the complex mining dashboard and instead embed them into your Process Models, where they are easy to read. Further, having a powerful Process Modelling platform enables the documentation of the best practices from the top performing areas and application of this to those bottom performers – the ability to accurate capture the target process and underlying information is critical to this.
BPM plays a critical role in enabling major system changes – initially it is used to define the As-Is to facilitate a gap analysis against best practice and defining the functional design. The assets should then again be reused to support rollout, with models educating on the new way of working and mining monitoring adoption and ROI.
Finally, Customer Journeys are underpinned by good operational processes. By documenting your Customer Journey, you can identify the data, sentiment, systems, and process touchpoints underpinning it. This visibility then enables you to drive targeted change. By articulating the underlying operational processes and system, you give a clear indication of how to practically make improvements to the Customer Journey.
Summary:
- Process Mining – great to identify issues or to monitor ROI but cannot independently drive change.
- Process Modelling:
- Attribute capture and reporting – required to define requirements or to embed the requite detail to rollout the new way of working.
- Collaboration and governance – critical for engaging business stakeholders in improvement design.
- Customer Journeys – to drive effective change, must be able to visualise these alongside the underpinning systems and operational processes.