Business Process Management

Business Process Management or BPM is a useful business excellence concept that provides methods and approaches to handle Business Processes in an organization – from cradle to grave. Business Processes are everything that an organization uses to carry out the various activities that are required to run the business – from delivering products to hiring people, from launching new products to shutting down!

The two distinct stages that constitute business process management are:

Defining Business Processes

All activities that a business performs are business processes. Sometimes, activities may start getting performed without a defined process existing. In such cases, process definition must be formalized at the earliest.

Defining Processes includes all of the following:
1. Writing processes
2. Incorporating process usage feedback and process improvement opportunities into the defined set of processes through
a.Adding new processes
b.Updating existing processes
c.Deleting/archiving processes
3. Publishing the processes
4. Sending out relevant communications to relevant stakeholders as a pre-requisite to Deploying Business Processes

Deploying Business Processes

Business processes deliver their true value if and only if deployed effectively. And as “the proof of the pudding lies in its eating”, changes felt necessary during deployment should get fed back into the process description.

Deploying Processes would include all of the following:
1. Training and mentoring on processes
2. Usage of processes in performing business activities
3. Gathering process usage feedback
4. Identifying process improvement opportunities
5. Providing process usage feedback and process improvement opportunities to the Defining Business Processes stage