Table of Contents
Part:
1. Think of a BPM project that could be done in your organization. Describe the
current process and the main issues.
BPM
is a method for taking a gander at and afterward controlling the processes that
are available in an organization. It is a compelling technique to use in times
of emergency to make sure that the processes are proficient and viable, as this
will bring about a superior and more cost productive organization. (Jeston & Nelis, 2014). The
term business process administration covers how we study, recognize, change,
and screen business processes to guarantee they run easily and can be enhanced
over the long haul. Regularly encircled as far as the everyday stream of work –
and yes, "work process" for the most part does fit under the process
change umbrella – it is a vital bit of the right to gain entrance and use
riddle since no or poor process truly corrupts your capacity to get at and
influence data. BPM is best considered a business work on, incorporating
procedures and organized techniques. (Sadiq, Governatori, & Namiri, 2007)
It is not an innovation, however there are advances available that convey the
descriptor in light of what they empower: in particular, distinguishing and
adjusting existing processes so they adjust to a wanted, probably enhanced,
future condition of issues. It is about formalizing and systematizing better
courses for work to accomplish. (Wohed, Aalst, Dumas, Hofstede, & Russell, 2006).
In other
words business process management (BPM) is a field in operations management
that concentrates on enhancing corporate execution by overseeing and upgrading
an organization's business processes. It can thusly be portrayed as a
"process enhancement process." (Bhattacharya, Gerede, Hull, Liu, & Su, 2007). It is contended that BPM empowers
associations to be more effective, more compelling and more equipped for change
than a practically centered, customary progressive management approach. These
processes can affect the expense and income era of an association.
As a
managerial methodology, BPM sees processes as vital resources of an association
that must be comprehended, overseen, and enhanced to convey quality added items
and administrations to customers. This methodology nearly looks like other
Total Quality Management or Continuous Improvement Process approachs and BPM
defenders additionally guarantee that this methodology can be upheld, or
empowered, through engineering. All things considered, numerous BPM articles and
savants habitually examine BPM from one of two perspectives: individuals and/or
engineering. (Hepp,
Leymann, Domingue, Wahler, & Fensel, 2005,).
The idea
of business process may be as conventional as ideas of errands, office,
creation, and yields, emerging from occupation shop booking issues in the early
twentieth Century. The management and change approach starting 2010, with
formal definitions and specialized demonstrating, has been around since the
early 1990s. Note that the expression "business process" is once in a
while utilized by IT professionals as synonymous with the management of
middleware processes or with coordinating application programming errands. (Trkman, 2010).
Despite
the fact that BPM at first centered on the robotization of business processes
with the utilization of data innovation, it has subsequent to been stretched
out to coordinate human-driven processes in which human collaboration happens
in arrangement or parallel with the utilization of engineering. Case in point,
work process management frameworks can dole out individual steps obliging
conveying human instinct or judgment to important people and different errands
in a work process to a pertinent computerized framework. (Ko, Lee, & Lee, 2009).
Later
varieties, for example, "human cooperation management" are concerned
with the communication between human laborers performing an assignment.
Starting
2010 innovation has permitted the coupling of BPM with different approachs, for
example, Six Sigma. Some BPM apparatuses, for example, Sipocs, Process Flows,
Racis, Ctqs and Histograms permit clients to:
·
visualize
-
capacities and processes
·
measure
- focus
the suitable measure to focus achievement
·
analyze
- contrast
the different reenactments with focus an ideal change
·
improve
- select
and execute the change
·
control
- convey
this usage and by utilization of client characterized dashboards screen the
change continuously and bolster the execution data go into the recreation
display in planning for the following change cycle
·
re-engineer - redo
the processes starting with no outside help for better comes about
This
brings with it the profit of having the capacity to mimic changes to business
processes focused around true information (not simply on accepted learning).
Likewise, the coupling of BPM to industry philosophies permits clients to
consistently streamline and advance the process to guarantee that it is tuned
to its market need. (Rohloff,
2009).
Starting
2012 examination on BPM has given careful consideration to the consistence of
business processes. Despite the fact that a key part of business processes is
adaptability, as business processes constantly need to adjust to changes in the
nature's turf, consistence with business method, arrangements and government
regulations ought to likewise be guaranteed. The agreeability perspective in
BPM is very critical for administrative associations. Starting 2010 BPM
approaches in an administrative setting to a great extent concentrate on
operational processes and information representation. Despite the fact that
there have been numerous specialized studies on operational business processes
in both the general population and private parts, specialists have once in a
while considered lawful agreeability exercises, for example the legitimate
usage processes in broad daylight organizing. (Pesic & Aalst, 2006)
Company overview and its current processes
I
am working in Norad. Norad have been trading since 1981. The company employs 29
members of staff. The organisation has a turnover of £22m a year. Norad Travel is
travel experts, supporting its customers from the boardroom to the beach and
everything in between. Its experienced team delivers a world-class service that
has positioned Norad as one of the fastest growing travel management
organisations in the UK. Through people, technology and experience, Norad
Travel continue to expand in this growing marketplace.
Norad
Travel is widely recognised as one of the UK’s fastest growing independent
travel management organisations. It has maintained its commitment to growth
with the opening of new offices in Hampshire, Kent etc and also with
international offices and business partnerships overseas. Underpinning its
continual success is the commitment of its staff to clients' requirements and
the attention to detail that only a truly personal service can provide. The
Norad Travel Group ensure peace of mind for all those who organize corporate
travel.
They
were required following goals to be achieved through a project: -
·
Remove a labour intensive, high volume
task of sending out customer invoices
·
Speed up the distribution of statements
·
Automation of customer invoices
·
Automation of unique customer statements
·
Automation of credit status notifications
·
100% on time and accurate invoicing
leading to improved credit control
Part:
2. for your BPM project, execute any three of the following phases of the BPM
methodology seen throughout the course:
·
Organization strategy phase (ch.
13)
·
Process architecture phase (ch. 14)
·
Launch pad phase (ch. 15)
·
Understand phase (ch. 16)
·
Innovate phase (ch.17)
·
People phase (ch. 18)
·
Develop phase (ch. 19)
In
ensuing paragraphs, first each selected phase is defined and then situation
related to my organization is elaborated.
Organization
strategy phase includes both the distinguishing proof of existing processes and
the outline of "to-be" processes. Zones of center incorporate
representation of the process stream, the elements inside it, alarms and
notices, accelerations, standard working strategies, administration level
understandings, and undertaking hand-over systems. Whether existing processes
are viewed as, the point of this step is to guarantee that a right and
productive hypothetical outline is readied. The proposed change could be in
human-to-human, human-to-framework or framework to-framework work processes,
and may target administrative, business, or aggressive difficulties confronted
by the organizations. The current process and the configuration of new process
for different applications will need to synchronies and not result in real
blackout or process intrusion. (Snabe, , Rosenberg, Mller, & Scavillo, 2008)
In
my company for the project, a strategy was formulated which consisted on the
following objectives achievement:
Reducing the cost and time
associated with invoicing. Invoicing is a universal business process and one
that is critical to the success of any organisation. Mistakes made within this
activity can have a serious effect on the organisation and great effort is made
to standardize associated internal procedures and best practices.
In
the company, it had a well drilled invoicing procedure but not content with
standing still it wanted to reduce the time and resource consumed by this
repetitive employee process. Furthermore, it wanted to iron out the errors that
all human driven processes can create.
Ensuring
customers receive statements in the format they require Meeting customer needs
is the foundation of a successful business but even this very basic business process
can create challenges for organisations. For example, sending prompt and
personalized customer statements can be open to errors, slow and difficult to
consistently deliver on time. The company had a very particular challenge when
it came to customer statements and that was that each customer often requested
a unique format and this was difficult to achieve consistently. It wanted a
system that could consistently follow unique business rules and meet customer
expectations each and every time. Their objectives included: -
·
Reduce operational costs
·
Streamline statement production
·
Reduce employee administration
·
Reduce bad credit exposure
Identifying
clients approaching their credit limit Improvements to credit control
procedures always have a positive impact on performance and the company was
keen to improve on its already efficient credit control procedures. In
particular, it wanted to remove the onus and responsibility placed on employees
to manually identify which clients were approaching their agreed credit limits.
The pains of unsuccessfully identifying clients approaching agreed limits were
painful to absorb and would consume a disproportionate amount of employee time.
Reducing the company’s exposure to debt was an objective that was identified as
a priority challenge.
Process
architecture phase takes the hypothetical plan and presents blends of variables
(e.g., changes in rent or materials costs, which decide how the process may
work under distinctive circumstances). (Ferguson, & Stockton, 2006)
In
the above project automating invoicing through simple drag
and drop steps the company saw TaskCentre as the perfect solution to resolve
its challenges surrounding invoicing. By utilising the products intuitive
Graphical User Interface and drag and drop tools the company was able to
automate the creation and distribution of invoices. The automated process
itself was achieved by using TaskCentre to query its industry specific TRAMS
database application on a scheduled basis, format the data as HTML and PDF
through TaskCentre’s Crystal Reports tool, save the PDF to a specific location
and send the file via SMTP to the client. Automating personalized statement
creation and distribution.
Automating our invoicing processes
through TaskCentre involved nothing more than the orchestration of a few icons
on a Graphical User Interface. Proactively monitoring and notifying on client
credit limits. As an organisation, the company had established a very robust
set of credit control procedures but it was keen to bolster processes further
and reduce its exposure to debt. It was identified that early notification of a
potential credit limit breach was key to reducing debt exposure and as result
it added rules-based alerting capabilities to its TRAMS system via TaskCentre.
To
achieve this solution Norad Travel used TaskCentre’s Schedule Event, ODBC
Query, Format as HTML and Send Message (SMTP) Tools to deliver email alerts to
key staff about clients that were approaching their agreed credit terms. The
flexibility and rule-driven intelligence of TaskCentre also meant that each
alert was unique to the credit terms of a particular client.
The next challenge facing the
company was how to automate the creation and delivery of personalized client
statements. The solution was a simplistic process for the company to create as
the automated process shares many similar characteristics to that of the
automated invoicing process. Once again TaskCentre’s drag and drop tools were
used to query the TRAMS database on a scheduled basis, format the data as HTML
and then PDF using the Crystal Report tool, save the PDF to a location and
distribute via SMTP.
Using
TaskCentre’s rules engine the company also applied business logic to each
statement so that clients received a personalized version:
·
Automate invoices
·
Automate personalized statements
·
Monitor and alert of credit limit statuses
·
Remove employees from repetitive admin
One of the approaches to robotize
processes is to create or buy an application that executes the obliged steps of
the process; then again, in practice, these applications once in a while
execute all the steps of the process precisely or totally. An alternate
methodology is to utilize a blend of programming and human mediation; however
this methodology is more unpredictable, making the documentation process
troublesome. As a reaction to these issues, programming has been produced that
empowers the full business process (as created in the process plan action) to
be characterized in a code which can be straightforwardly executed by the
machine. The framework will either utilize benefits as a part of joined
applications to perform business operations (e.g. figuring a reimbursement plan
for a credit) or, when a step is so mind boggling there is no option mechanize,
will request human information. Contrasted with both of the past methodologies,
straightforwardly executing a process definition can be more clear and in this
manner less demanding to move forward. Notwithstanding, mechanizing a process
definition obliges adaptable and complete framework, which regularly precludes
executing these frameworks in a legacy IT environment. Business standards have
been utilized by frameworks to give definitions to representing conduct, and a
business tenet motor can be utilized to drive process execution and
determination. (Fleischmann, Schmidt,
Stary, Obermeier, & Brger, 2012).
In
the launch pad phase the TaskCentre solutions were implemented. The commercial
gains of automating invoicing procedures are well documented and the company was
no different in terms of the benefits it’s achieved. Primarily, by automating
its invoicing procedures the company now benefits from 100% accurate and on
time billing and therefore collections also occur on time. This automated
process has also completely removed the problem of ‘missed’ invoices.
In
addition to the benefits of accurate and timely invoicing, TaskCentre has
removed the need for employees to manually create and send invoices. This has
delivered a significant saving in employee time and improved productivity.
Personalized
statements without the administrative overhead Creating and sending customer
statements, was a time consuming and error prone process for the company. More
importantly, it consumed a great deal of time from skilled employees that
should be focusing on delivering a personalized service to clients. TaskCentre
completely removed employees from this laborious and non-value adding task by
automating the process. In fact, this single automated process saved the
company in excess of 896 hours a year in repetitive employee administration and
ensures every client receives a personalized statement that is error free.
The
company now dynamically receives personalized statements without any employee
processing. It’s a win-win situation:
·
100% accurate and timely invoices
·
Eradication of costly employee
processing
·
Improved visibility of credit control
statuses
·
Personalized statements
·
Reducing debt exposure and keeping
clients within credit terms
Real-time,
consistent information is the key to managing credit limit statuses of clients.
Without Perfect visibility credit breaches can creep up and harm the
organisation. The problem the company experienced was not that it could not
identify these critical points; it was that they needed employees to do this
manually. This inevitably led to some clients approaching their credit limits
without identification.
TaskCentre
removed this problem by dynamically identifying when clients were approaching
their credit limits and informing the appropriate the company’s employee via an
HTML email alert. This provides employees with the ability to proactively
communicate with the client and extend their credit terms where appropriate.
More
significantly, this has resulted in the company reducing its exposure to debt
and further strengthened its financial performance.
Moving
forwards we can see a number of employee tasks that will be easy to automate
through TaskCentre. The company is systematically reviewing all its business
processes to see where automation can add value to productivity, financial
performance and the level of personal service it delivers to its clients. In
the short term the company will be extending its automated credit limit alerts
solution to the leisure department. Migrating this automated task to this
business function is simplistic and will have an immediate impact on financial
performance.
·
Identifying other business processes to
automation
·
Rolling out credit control alerts to the
leisure department
·
Automating additional management reports
·
Rolling out credit control alerts to the
leisure department. Automating additional management reports
TaskCentre
has been an excellent addition to our IT infrastructure because it delivered
commercial benefits quickly.
References
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J., & Nelis, J. (2014). Business process management. Routledge.
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