Getting started with Business Process Management

Business Process improvement initiatives within any organization must start with analyzing the current "AS-IS" state of the process. As I always say to my clients, the weakest link in Business process management is the business process itself. Poorly designed processes produce poor results, it is important to get them right and you can't get them right the first time hence process improvement is iterative and continuously need to adapt with ever changing business situations. In other words an organization can never be in a "To-Be" state because that state is dynamic and influenced by internal factors (re org, new direction, mergers/acquisitions) or external factors (regulatory/compliance/market etc). So best strategy is to understand the "AS-IS" state and analyze that to infer what in the current process is working and what is not, the result of which is applied to improve the "AS-IS" process. As you do this more iteratively you are consistently doing the following things:
a) Analyzing the current "AS- IS" state
b) Applying the results to improve the "AS-IS" state.
What you achieve implicitly is that the process is being improved and corrected along the way.

Now the million dollar question, how on earth does organization know their AS-IS state. The answer is they don't, reality is most organization base their understanding of the AS-IS state from manuals/documents that are outdated or directly from the employees who by the way rely in the same outdated manuals/documents or from other employees. So it is cyclic... So this methodology will result in a "AS-IS" state that is outdated so I want to refer this "INVALID AS-IS" state. I'm also not trying to undermine the challenges in terms of convincing clients that their understanding of the process is wrong. Lets deal with that for later.

Now the real question, Ok so if the process state derived from these documents or et al is incorrect how do i know?

Enter Fujitsu Automated process discovery service.. Oh here we go again a consulting service? No this is not a traditional interview based techniques to understand the process, it is a service empowered by a tool that can visualize an organization "AS-IS" as it really is. You can find more details on here and how it works.

You really have to see the demo to understand the power and information spit out from this tool. It is just awesome. It is a must have for every person who is interested in understanding and improving the process. If these things are of interest to you, this tool is just for you!

• Finding best performing processes route
• Cost of accomplishing these processes
• Am I in compliance or not? Cost of compliance vs non compliance
• Exception paths and how often these paths were taken and time/money spent on those exceptions processes
• How good or bad is my current process?
• Where and who are the bottlenecks?
• How do i get my process back on track, complete visibility.

Going back to core part of the message here, you can only improve what you can measure. The measurement should start with understanding with your current state of high visibility business process and take it from there....

Its the right way to do BPM! Lets do it right.

--Rajiv Onat