Essential Business Process Modeling

The Benefits of BPM

An organization’s decision to build a BPM solution is made by its business architects , CIO, CTO, or CEO. Possible motivations for choosing BPM include the following:

Formalize existing process and spot needed improvements

Adopting BPM forces a business to think through and formalize its understanding of current processes. Along the way, those running the business invariably spot potential improvements, such as the removal of steps, automation of manual steps, or the reengineering of a part or the whole of the flow.

Facilitate automated, efficient process flow

Given that a process spans multiple activities, the less time spent between activities, the better. When BPM software drives the process flow, downtime between activities is almost zero, unless the software itself is down. Even better, BPM supports process parallelism, so that independent sequences of work can be performed concurrently in isolation of each other, with their results merged and synchronized later in the flow. A process controlled by some other means—for example, by phone calls, emails, or inter-office mail exchange—is bound to be significantly slower and prone to getting lost or stuck.

Increase productivity and decrease head count

Get work done faster with fewer people! Actual BPM case studies provide some interesting results: a financial services was able to reduce staff from 613 to 406 while decreasing processing time and increasing customer satisfaction; an insurance company trimmed off 40% ...