BPM from zero to infinity discusses the success of BPM projects in different enterprises, success depends on enterprise type and culture. I mean by type, the company type as a product or service provider to specify company main goals and requirements. And by culture, the way it perform operations and do its internal and external communications.
A lot of basic questions arise here, Is BPM required for each company, What type of company needs BPM more? Is it large companies, small companies or all need BPM, Can BPM be a solution for all problems inside a company and how BPM solves it if it’s a possible solution? Are there any preceding steps to a BPM project, how BPM starts in a company and where it ends? Are there any prerequisites before starting with a BPM project and how much BPR radical process re-engineering is the best choice for a business? However can we own a final answer for all these or more questions? I doubt we can cover all!! The success of BPM is not by doing certain steps or doing a set of plans, but it’s a reflection on the daily workflow behavior for each employee and each process in an enterprise. Before starting with a BPM project you should have defined roles and responsibilities per department and per employee.
From my experience, the most challenging problem that makes an enterprise consume its resources illogically is the overlap in duties especially between departments, lets say if engineering people do customer surveys this will overlap marketing people basic work to contact customers, and/or to analyze their needs. Work must be defined for each job title, responsibilities should have a start and end till a specific person in his/her department handover the process to the other person responsible to continue other steps in another department. On the other hand, a big issue many enterprises face which is the lack of communications between different levels. Defining a rule of communicating information internally and externally in departmental basis should be clear to each employee. So that the general company strategy and planned achievements are known, understood, and audited by each employee. After these important steps of gap analysis in an enterprise, defining roles and responsibilities, defining communication rules and policies, with already defined strategies to meet the goals in a certain timeline, and what resources are needed for each stage, a BPM project can start.
A BPM project will be a vital step in an enterprise or organization especially those providing services and have competitors in their region. The competition now not only in the sales revenues, but its in customer loyalty and employee loyalty; providing a procedural structure for all company workflow activities. Defining the end to end process with its detailed procedures with each stage assigned to the responsible employee, and then optimizing the process quality, cost, and time-wise which will increase the overall performance, whilst such BPM may lead to a BPR if radical changes are needed.
Finally, business performance management is the most important step at the end of a BPM project that makes it go to infinity and this infinity means business continuity and competition and overall advance in productivity, auditing each process in a company and evaluating its performance through defined key performance indicators (KPI). Also from my work experience a supporting step to perform BPM projects is "knowing your employee"; What’s their needs? and putting the right person in the right place! so that he/she can work with their full productivity and then share in the process with best performance and minimal time helping in the competition, this is an important KPI to consider when reaching the business performance management "The Human Factor."
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