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BPM: From Improvement to Excellence and to Improve again

The main objective of BPM, as model to guide its business process management of a company, is found permanently immersed in a cycle of continuous improvement. When a business process is improved so that is no longer possible to make further improvements to it, we can say we have achieved excellence, and is a fully optimized process. At this point, we might think that if our business process is optimal, why not abandon or relax the improvement activities cost savings, since you cannot find any improvement?

It is a well-known that the improvement should always be done continuously, but why? Why cannot improve a business process to achieve excellence, let it fully optimized and give the work terminated?: Because the world changes. Because the company, people, systems, products, services, ultimately the whole world, changes, evolves, is dynamic.

Companies that are not immersed in a cycle of continuous improvement and ultimately in a continuous evolutionary process, are doomed to extinction, since the differences with the other companies in your industry growing business will be larger, and reach a time the competition will have much more optimized processes and will not compete with them. There is only one scenario in which the lack of investment in improved cost no life: when all companies behave the same sector, without investment in improvement (this type of scenario presents great opportunities and risks both for obvious reasons). In times of economic crisis perfectly identify companies with processes close to excellence; they are those ones that survive (natural selection).

When we know our business process is excellent?, You may never get to know, because that would know for sure that today is not possible to make the process better, and therefore no company from our competition is doing better. And in any case, what it would know that the process is excellent, if tomorrow you may see a new technology, product, service, etc. .. to allow my process can be improved and therefore is no longer good?.
But we can sense when a process is not great and / or is too far from optimal. To improve is needed to measure. Before submitting any improvement action, I must know what aspects I want to improve and for this I set the basic parameters of the process of my business I want to measure and transmit me the information I needed to guess if my process is improved. It is what we call business process indicators (KPIs). Two typical examples may be the unit cost and manufacturing time. If the information obtained from these monitoring, I gather enhancements, I get bad indicators, or worse, I compare the indicators of competition and comparison that is not favorable to my company, the process can be improved, otherwise it may be optimal or close to excellence (buy only today, tomorrow certainly is not).

In either case, whether my process is optimal or not is should I continue improvement activities, and when I get my process to optimize and achieve excellence, I must continue to improve because, who says me that tomorrow there is not a new supplier in China that offers me 50% of supply cost that I'm buying now equal or better quality, or who can say me that my competition doesn’t wins market share because he has managed to have better business processes than mine?

BPM provides a great opportunity to streamline and facilitate the improvement to be excellent today, and to continue improving to remain the better tomorrow.

Raúl Gualberto Tinoco

IT Senior Consultant

rgualberto@yahoo.es

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It’s not the same: Managing Business Process (MBP) and Business Process Management (BPM)

Sometimes we tend to confuse managing business process with business process management, the latter known universally by BPM. While the first is an activity that helps the smooth processes execution, their control, including its improvement, the second (BPM), is conceived as a comprehensive discipline that defines a model of how a company should organize to achieve their strategic business objectives. I say a model, to emphasize that there are other models different to BPM, such as the orientation of the organization of a company's functions - departments (does this mean that departments make less sense in an organization aimed at BPM?, This doubt I leave it to discuss in future articles).

Managing business processes we can understand how all those management activities aiming at the proper execution of each process of the company that is, their monitoring, provision of resources and sufficient means, its improvement so that subsequent executions of the same process are more efficient, resolution of incidents and problems associated with the process execution, the reengineering of a process (one-shot project on time, etc.). Any task that focused on the process to run as best as possible, we can understand it as framed in the managing business processes.

The business process management or BPM is a discipline / framework upon which a company organizes, operates, produces, derives income, etc., ie it operates in the company over a lifetime (Enterprise Architecture). BPM determines clearly that the fundamental object for the operation of the company is the business process (whether this is so or not, is the orientation of BPM, and it is possible that many business experts do not think the same), and about of this concept (the process) should organize the company. BPM has a clear objective, to promote and facilitate continuous improvement (continuous project). Having a business process view is easier to identify and make the improvements that enhance the activity of the company, according to BPM.

As a result, BPM is not in opposition to the managing business processes and vice versa, but the second is an activity or set of activities necessary but not sufficient for BPM. The business process management complete BPM, but not fully defined it. We are talking on different scopes, both within the BPM, a global company and other specific business processes.

Some examples of scope of different concepts depending on whether you are contextualized in BPM or Managing Business Process:

	BPM	MBP
Organization	Leadership and participant roles in company management and processes. Organization of company.	Responsible and participants roles identification in processes. Organization in processes.
Processes	Characterization and relationship processes. (Horizontal vs. Vertical pej.). Process Architecture.	Processes inventory
Improve	Continuous	Spot. Concrete actions for improvement in a process.
Architecture	Business and Processes Architecture. Common threads.	Technical Architecture with services orchestration of activities.

In my opinion, when we want to refer to managing business process would be more appropriate to speak about process improvement or BPI instead of BPM, and let this last concept to discuss about a framework for Enterprise Architecture.

Raúl Gualberto Tinoco

IT Senior Consultant

rgualberto@yahoo.es

Thanks for your comments.

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Regards.