For any business, of any scale, in any sector to run smoothly, it is essential for management to have a full view of every aspect of the business from end-to-end, says David van Rensburg, SAS Support Executive: team leader at SYSPRO SA.
This transparent approach allows them to identify areas of inefficiency and engage in plans for improvement. They can optimise the business by viewing all the processes and identifying which of those can be adjusted. The result is greater efficiency, productivity and profit– everything the business needs to stay ahead of competitors.
Business Process Modelling (BPM) enables this by ensuring that every process of a business is clearly defined and visible to management at any given time – thereby removing the need to rely on feedback from individual employees.
The central role processes play in a business mean that every single process needs to be defined for optimal efficiency. It’s a systematic approach to managing a business by creating a clear and holistic view of the people, processes and systems governing its day-to-day execution.
Reinventing the wheel
In the business environment, defining processes becomes especially important in the case of staff changes. For example, think of a business that has had an excellent credit controller for the past 10 years. This employee has established solid, efficient processes without having them clearly defined.
If this employee were to retire or resign, their replacement would have to spend valuable time figuring out exactly what all of their duties are and would have to set up their own processes to carry these duties out – unnecessarily reinventing the wheel. Even if there is an overlap period where the old employee trains the new one, things often get lost in translation and the results can have a negative impact on the business.
Without effective BPM, all business processes reside purely in the heads of the employees carrying them out – if you’re lucky they might be sitting in documents on their computers. Either way, there’s absolutely no transparency and management is unable to easily see all parts of the business at any given time.
Business blueprint
BPM provides a single source of the full truth. Making all business process information easily accessible to all – providing a holistic view of how all gears in the business work and how they fit together.
At SYSPRO, for example, we map out all the existing processes in your business and assign roles and align systems to them, using SYSPRO Process Modelling (SPM). A completed SPM project provides a complete blueprint of a business within a process-modelling environment (SPM Database) and provides the ability to report out of this environment.
Once business processes have been designed and blueprinted, they need to be executed and continuously monitored in order to identify areas for optimisation. This is especially important because a business must continuously re-engineer and improve its processes. For example, the blueprint can help identify processes that can be automated, leaving employees free to focus on more important tasks.
This is ultimately the central purpose of BPM – to offer a fully transparent view from which it is easy to see where there is room for improvement and streamlining in order to gain the competitive advantage.
The tech advantage
Businesses today, big or small, must adopt a strategy of technology enablement in order to remain competitive in the current market. The challenge, therefore, lies in choosing a technology that enables both current business processes and future technology requirements.
BPM provides management with reliable and transparent information on which to make sound business decisions.
The primary source of business information should no longer be Word documents and spread sheets that have no relationship to one another. Instead, businesses should have defined, highly accessible models that not only give a clear understanding and transparent view of the business processes and systems across an organisation, but also encourage focused thinking and reduce complexity.
