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business processes - how to select a business process tool
Core to all businesses are the processes executed on a day-to-day basis. Get them wrong, and a business will fail, or at best perform inefficiently. Respect your business processes and the opposite will occur - a streamlined environment where employees can focus more on doing business, with less time spent on energy sapping agendas that they rather or should not be involved. The over-riding effect is increased potential for greater profit, plus a happier workforce and clientele. As business processes stretch across the whole company or in some cases across a worldwide corporation, they affect everything. In particular they affect the employees, the applications they use, the data they access, and the quality control of the business. Relationships bind people, applications, data, and quality control together. Developing business processes therefore should have an emphasis on building relationships between these elements, and defined work-flows. There are many Business Process Management software tools (BPM) on the market, and many software applications that can be used to draw and map processes. As business processes are core to a business, it is worth selecting a tool dedicated to the function of mapping and analyzing processes. The complexity, cost and ease of use of these BPM tools varies immensely. Employing a business analyst or consultant to run these tools is often an expensive proposition. In many cases this is also time-consuming, as the analyst will need to understand all your day-to-day interactions, even those involved in highly specialist roles within your business. But this misses the point. Center to all processes are your staff, it is they that business processes affect, and it is they where the real knowledge of how the business operates (or should operate), is held. Their full involvement in analyzing the processes of their day-to-day role is critical, as isolation could de-motivate. With this in mind, on choosing a tool to help you develop, analyze and map business processes, the software that you use needs to be accessible by all involved, and so ease of use is imperative. Ideally, if you want to take things further, the tool also needs to be able to export standardized business process notation that where, or if required, can be digested and finessed by a business process analyst, or imported into existing enterprise systems. Finding the right tool and re-engineering (or in some cases introducing) business processes is worth the effort and cost. Doing it right, not only will your employees be happier in an environment where each knows what they and everyone else does, it will simplify training of new and existing personnel, and help staff manage conflicts better. Your client will also appreciate a business that knows what it is doing, and appreciate the increase in quality control as a result of improved process clarity. But don’t forget to build in controls that will increase accuracy and help monitor your business landscape. Your data that you rely on so heavily will also improve as fewer mistakes leading to unclean data will occur. What software fits the bill? Well so far I haven’t found that tool that puts all people as the driving force at the center for process development, or is priced for a quick return on investment. In particular, I have not found a tool that has the flexibility to produce industry standard business process notation that can interpolate with other systems. What I do know is that if you use PowerPoint to draw up processes, you’ll soon come unstuck. I can’t recommend Visio either - it is too expensive and has a steep learning curve. In fact, can’t recommend any Business Process Management tool to date as they are either too expensive, too specialist, inflexible, or impossible to use if you are not a business process analyst. Suggestions welcome!! |
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