I have before discussed how important technology is and that this is one of the essential qualifications that a top executives need to cope with and understand.
What I also understand after some meetings lately is that technology also is very important for HR departments to understand. It Is not only the top executives who need to have understanding but also the staff who work with recruiting of employees also.
Without understanding the importance of technology and the use of it, will make it difficult for HR to understand what kind of qualifications the company needs. http://www.dr-glennhole.org/referance-cases/ It does not help that the IT department gives HR department a description of what kind of qualifications they looking for if the HR department do not understand what technology is and how it can be used.
Technology is much more than bits and bytes and data servers etc. To understand technology one need to understand that technology is changing how information is created, stored, retrieved, and transmitted. Technology has already transformed corporate management functions, and the changes continue as corporate organisations adopt new enterprise systems, ERP in finance, human resources, sales, productions, media distribution etc. I have before described how we used technology to improve the national school fruit administration in Norway. http://www.dr-glennhole.org/top-executives-need-to-cope-with-and-understand-technology/
I have for example worked with implementing of new technology in the media sector, within newspaper distribution too major back-end systems for the management and administration of taxi transport. We are talking about large systems which currently controls a third part of how all taxis in Norway are directed and controlled.
To understand how technology can be used with the maximum degree of effectiveness, demand knowledge and understanding of business process management, BPM. Technological advance creates opportunities but it doesn’t dictate how the opportunities will be used. That depends on the technical knowledge and understanding of technology, and on the contexts and organizations in which they operate. If innovators implement a new technology badly, others will learn from the experience and eventually get it right. Early miss-steps can delay the diffusion of an innovation, but they are unlikely to block it forever. One shouldn’t be surprised if the first uses of a new technology seem less than earth shaking. Technological advances enabled remote input-output and timesharing on the mainframe.
Therefore to succeed within technologically issues one need to understand how business processes management and business process improvements works. Technology is changing how information is created, stored, retrieved, and transmitted and is part of business processes management.
I would argue that the reason why several major IT implementations fail is due to the lack of understanding of both technology and business processes.
Further more I will argue that Business Processes and Technology takes the focus on business process towards understanding and managing operations, information systems, and management/decision making in contemporary organizations. A wide range of information technologies in business processes are integrated throughout. Enterprise systems are integrated software packages designed to provide complete integration of an organization’s business information processing systems and all related data. Data is shared across systems to support the operation and management of the organization. Modules within these packages are named for the functions that they support and include logistics (sales and distribution, procurement, inventory management), accounting (financial accounting, treasury, controlling), manufacturing (planning and scheduling, cost accounting, capacity planning), and human resources (payroll, employee tracking, tax compliance). It is critical that business professionals understand these systems because they are members of teams that install and operate them in their organizations, and they require access to information captured within these systems to be effective managers. Installing an enterprise system requires that the business processes of an organization be understood and documented. Sometimes, the business processes must be changed and then mapped to the enterprise system. A major part of installation is configuring the enterprise system to tailor it to the business processes. Consultants, business process owners, system users, and evaluators must understand these systems and be able to install, use, and assess them.
E-business is the application of electronic networks (including the Internet) to undertake business processes between individuals and organizations. These processes include interaction between back-office processes (internal processes such as distribution, manufacturing, and accounting) and front-office processes (external processes such as those that connect an organization to its customers and suppliers). Electronic networks include the Internet and electronic data interchange (EDI).
I argue that the reason why so few realy undstand the use of technology is their lack of understanding Business Process Management.
A successful BPM strategy can power an enterprise’s full business process cycle and help achieve innovation, differentiation, and bottom line growth. The importance of BPM lies in its ability to enable companies to quickly adapt to changing circumstances, meet critical regulatory compliance, and rapidly improve critical business processes. In short the Business Process Management can be describe as Business process management (BPM) is a systematic approach to improving an organization’s business processes. BPM activities seek to make business processes more effective, more efficient, and more capable of adapting to an ever‐changing environment. BPM is a subset of infrastructure management, the administrative area of concern dealing with maintenance and optimization of an organization’s equipment. The significance of Business Process Management is‐‐ Business processes are a fundamental building block of organizational success. Even though effectively managing business process is a key activity for business prosperity there remain considerable gaps in understanding how to drive efficiency through a process approach. Building a clear and deep understanding of the range process, how they function, and how to manage them is the major challenge facing modern business.
Business Process Management requires a clear understanding of the processes that would be automated and there is here the use of technology comes in.
I argue that if you don’t understand the the processes that would be automated you have not understood how you can use technology.
- Pick up the process that best addresses corporate objectives, current problems, and feasibility concerns You must be able to facilitate conversations about goals, responsibilities, problems, and, of course, processes. And these conversations must ultimately result in prioritization of projects and processes that everyone agrees have the biggest impact for your business. This is called process discovery. It is a crucial capability for your organization. In fact, process discovery is most crucial for companies that have committed to BPM as the question quickly evolves to – what do we do next? Answering that question is essential to on‐going success with process management.
- Create the complete understanding document of the process: Once a process is identified, it needs to be documented accurately with a definite beginning and an end. This is an important step and often determines the success of the implementation. While the documentation can be done by any one, it is best that this be done by somebody who is familiar with the process.
- Analysis and decision making on process flow diagram: At this point of time, the organization could also take a decision on whether to automate the process as is or to introduce improvements. The documentation also needs to be structured so as to answer questions that would come up during implementation. A flow chart is best for an easy graphical representation, but various elements and decision points need to be clearly marked out and noted.
- Modularize the process: Once processes are broken into activities, each activity needs to be taken up in detail, defining the ‘role’ that will execute the action, the ‘items’ that need to be captured in the activity, whether the data will be manually entered or electronically picked up.
- Define “Data Structure” and “Execution Methodology” for process: Processes can trigger sub‐processes, other super processes and can initiate/ be initiated by triggers from Enterprise applications. Some activities could be mandatory for the commencement of subsequent activities while some may not and some branches of a process may need to trigger exception reporting.
- Insert “Interface”, “Validation Process”, upgrade the application to “Enterprise Application”: BPM can also drive validations, control authorizations and be used to log data at a micro level. There could be a mix of human interaction, system validation, Enterprise application interfaces orchestrated by the process builder so that the organization moves in harmony. On the other hand, Process Management tools can also be used to simply pump data from one Enterprise application to another and back.
BPM allows tremendous efficiency gains as the technology does much of the hard work. No longer an invoice be hidden in someone’s in‐tray and no longer a staff expense claim is lost. There are three key advantages that BPM can bring to the table:
- Transparency BPM makes a business process absolutely transparent, greatly improving visibility and efficiency. Bottlenecks can literally be seen, and removed. It can show where the most delays are occurring, and where is each transaction stuck as it passes from one stage to another.
- Process refinement The initial configuration and design exercise coupled with the data that emerges after running processes for some time can allow refinement.
- Centralization of Data about each and every transaction is logged and can be retrieved as and when required. Therefore, it is possible to analyse accurately what happened. Referencing is also easier as embedded searches allow for data to be picked up as required for study.
- Agility The final key benefit BPM provides is agility. In the era of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and On‐Demand, agility is a well‐understood concept. In the world of Process Management, the ability to change quickly is essential. Our customers change their key processes 4‐7 times per year. The driver for change can be internal or external. New opportunities can arise. New partners or customers need you to support a different way of doing business. Federal or international regulations can require you to change your processes. BPM provides the platform you need to be able to change your processes – faster and in a more controlled fashion than any other option. Agility benefits typically include supporting federal regulations faster – eliminating chances of fines or delays in approval. Another example includes the ability to change a process to accommodate unforeseen events. An insurance agency can quickly adjust its claims approval threshold upward when a natural disaster happens in a specific part of the country. It can be difficult to calculate hard returns from agility, although most organizations recognize that the ability to quickly adapt processes is a critical competitive capability.
Challenges that forced organization to look forward to BPM Smooth BPM is no longer an option. Companies face business challenges that need to be addressed immediately. The challenges at the top of the list are the following
- Increasing operating margins to meet competitive pressure: In such a competitive any drawback in business process may cause the failure of project flow and it divert the solution group to away from solution. Operating margin is an important measurement of management’s efficiency, and also the profitability and performance of a company. A company having a higher operating margin on average than its industry competitor’s, tends to have better gross margins and lower fixed costs, thereby giving management more flexibility in influencing prices. To face and win against competitors client require a “Business Process” which will implement a way to solution flow where it will show the way to reduce the cost for “Sales and strategy”, ”Goods cost” etc.
- Reinforcing innovation to expand or tap into new markets: To catch the competitive client market vender should have to insert the innovative ideas in the “Enterprise Business Process”. The ideas can be execute either in trigger methods or it will be bind with data. Here the process monitoring system uses to see the changes happening in market and implement or sense the system about the changes. For example, if any firm changing their marketing policies or increase their practice on any vertical, the system should catch and reflect on board.
- Complying on schedule with mandatory regulations: Some time some known regulation may happen in business line. This regulation use to have an impact on “Enterprise Business Process Flow”. From client perspective they want when this regulation will be implemented by on trigger process one or more subsequence module contains client policies will be executed and entire process flow will be reschedule along with the required changes in “Business Application”. How BPM software provide optimize process for “Business Support”: Businesses are a collection of connected processes and that to be agile, those processes must frequently be realigned or reconnected so they can address changing business environments, redefined business objectives, and newly imposed regulations. These processes must frequently be realigned or reconnected so they can address changing business environments, redefined business objectives, and newly imposed regulations. Adaptable business processes result in increased operational margins and therefore in true competitive advantage. An agile enterprise can continuously improve key business processes and adapt them to changing circumstances. effective business process management has again emerged as a core business asset. As BPM increases in importance, the business process layer within the technology stack has also gained increased attention.
Technology need to support “Business Process”: Business Process Management Software, as a technology, can deliver endless benefits to any‐ sized organization but more importantly these benefits will be unique to your company. Through automating repetitive employees business processes, such as report creation and distribution or the monitoring of or reporting on company KPI’s, Task Centre reduces your operational costs and frees‐up employees to concentrate on activities that are important to the success of your business.
Business Process Management Software works by ‘loosely coupling’ with a company’s existing applications which enables it to monitor, extract, format and distribute information to systems and people; in line with business events or rules. By leveraging the processes and information of existing applications, automated business processes can be configured and re‐configured without having to alter the underlying configuration of a company’s applications. Task Centre merely uses these applications as information services and workflow trigger points. Creating or re‐creating an automated business process is achieved via any PC on which Task Centre is installed through its intuitive and logical Graphical User Interface (GUI). This GUI enables an administrator to automate common employee‐driven processes, such as creating and sending end‐of‐week sales reports. Stronger Revenue Streams: Increase revenue by providing implementation and deployment services to BPM software customers and also increase in services revenue: Partners can get more services revenues by expanding their offerings to their existing customers. Operational Savings: BPM focuses on optimization of processes. The processes that are repetitive are optimized and lead to reduction expenses which translates to immediate cost savings.
By automating a task ROI of BPM that requires six hours of manual intervention, one can expect to cut that time to half. Thus, three hours multiplied by the number of times the process is completed in a cycle will yield significant cost saving.
- BPM implementations often result in numerous intangible benefits that translate into tangible savings in costs and increased revenues in the long run.
- Automation of processes reduces errors due to human intervention. The reduction in errors saves the time of rework and improves quality of processes as well.
- BPM automation of processes that impact revenue generation has an immediate and significant impact on revenues.
- Application integration which is one of the most powerful phases of BPM leads to reductions in IT management and administration time, development time and costs, and lower support costs. G. Reduction in the Administration involved with Compliance and ISO Activities: The need for compliance and governance plays a major role in modern corporations.
Be it a quality assurance initiative such as the ISO standards, a financial audit law, or an IT systems best‐practice implementation, companies worldwide are seeing the need to manage compliance as part of their everyday business activities. Regardless of the program, clarifying and reengineering business processes is the basis for improvement. The BPM is ideally suited to help support companies in their quest for process improvement and compliance/governance certification. BPM gives full control over process and document change, clarity of inherent risks, and the ease with which process knowledge is communicated across the company. Higher Customer Satisfaction Levels : Achieving high levels of customer satisfaction is a core issue for any business. A number of common factors have been identified as critical drivers of customer satisfaction. It proposes a positive linear relationship between staff satisfaction, service quality and customer satisfaction leading, ultimately, to profitability.
Freeing‐up of Employee Time: While the euphuism “time is money” is often over‐used, it is very germane to this topic, because in business, for each additional hour it takes to complete a manual business process, there is a hard cost associated with employee time as well as soft costs associated with losing business or lowered productivity. Another area where time comes into play is in opportunity costs. Eradication of Data Entry Errors: BPM provide tight integration with conflicts and practice management systems, reference systems and applications such as finance, client relationship management, and document management and This integration promotes data reuse, reduces duplicate entry, and eliminates data entry errors. Critical Failure Avoidance: BPM reduce the probability of a risk and/or the impact that an occurrence of the risk may bear.
- Risk limitation strategy of Risk management module of BPM aims at the implementation of controls that dampen the effects of risk occurrences, while not completely alleviating them.
- Risk avoidance strategy of Risk management module eliminates the probability of a specific risk before its occurrence. This strategy is normally realized by trading the risk for other risks that are less threatening or easier to deal with.
- Risk transfer strategy of Risk management module shift risk or the consequences caused by the risk from one party to another. Also called “risk sharing”. Risk transfer may involve the purchase of an insurance policy, or the outsourcing of risky project parts.
- Risk Acceptance strategy of Risk management and Assumption adapt to the risk when it becomes a problem. The enactment of a risk contingency plan is required in this strategy.
In order to face challenges and beat the economic downturn, not all enterprises are putting their IT updating plans in cold storage. In fact, there is a higher demand for solutions that help enterprises to become more cost effective and utilize its resources in an effective way.