Combining Business Process Management and Workflow

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Every business today is aware of the importance of quick access to and fast delivery of organizational and business information. Business process management (BPM), which integrates workflow and applications, also requires automation of unstructured business processes to be totally successful. Streamlining business processes boosts productivity, profits and growth, and can save costs, improve process cycle times and power efficiency.

Workflow deals with human or computer-related transactions and processes having content, such as processing an insurance claim, opening a savings account, processing accounts payable or handling a customer complaint. Workflow can involve the flow of documents, business rules and archiving or web-access permissions. Workflow can highlight bottlenecks in the system but represents only part of the whole BPM picture.

BPM provides a complete management approach, encompassing and optimizing workflow in an integrated and dynamic framework, while generating a set of vital business metrics. BPM also increases organizational agility and efficiency, promotes process visibility, accountability and transparency and provides an audit trail. BPM allows users to identify and choose tasks to automate or eliminate from automation.

Automating workflow encompasses:

• Identifying steps, personnel and applications involved in processing. This alone can highlight areas for workflow improvement.
• Automating workflow to route tasks cost effectively and efficiently.
• Integrating workflow between applications enterprise wide.

Why Automate Workflow?

Some of the reasons for automation are obvious. Automation is faster and more efficient, and it can reduce the risks of human error. Beyond that, however, automated workflow aids businesses in other ways:

• It allows easy, quick execution and tracking of complex simultaneous processes.
• It pinpoints specific processes during cycles, identifying the stage at which they occur, the personnel performing the task, and the next logical step in the process.
• It assigns workflow to automated tasks, or, alternatively to people involved in the process (e.g., claims executive or customer desk representative).
• It uses permission levels or other information in the business rules to route workflow to the proper personnel (e.g., a mortgage loan-processing document over $250,000 routed to the CFO).
• It allows thousands of simultaneous users access to a thousand workflow completions (starts and stops).

Essentially, automating workflow routes correct processes to appropriate personnel at the right time.

Complex Simultaneous Transactions

Workflow eases those processes that need several processes or applications simultaneously. For instance, a customer relations officer takes an order from a new customer. The order must be approved and updated simultaneously in the customer database in line with credit permissions, inventory, shipping, accounts receivable and finance. Automating in this instance is quick, easy to track and leaves a clear trail, in accordance with legal requirements.

Pinpointing Specific Process Details

At any point during a specific process, users can check process status and change business rules as necessary within permission levels. For example, authorized users can prioritize a waiting queue of customer callers to service important business callers first, or they can authorize processing an insurance claim for a specific client faster in accordance with an SLA. Either way, automating workflow in a BPM environment allows companies to separate problems, provide better customer service and become more efficient and profitable.

To take another example, a company processing 10,000 mortgage loans a day could gain greater efficiency among its departmental strength of 50 people by separating problems into groups. For example, representatives could ask if the borrower is approved; if the terms, interest rate and limit are approved; and whether the limit needs additional approvals.

Assigning Workflow

Allowing the software to assign workflow either to an automated process or to a person makes companies more cost efficient. By automating the simpler processes, organizations can reduce costs and risk of errors, and by allocating more complex processes to people, they can offer their clientele a more sophisticated range of products and services. This helps businesses to remain competitive and add value to their services.

Working With Business Rules

Automated workflow works in accordance with business rules, using real-time feedback to change them when necessary. Business rules can define parameters like permission levels, authorization limits, exceptions and more. For example, a typical mortgage loan-processing task could set an authorization limit on the loan amount or ask for supervisory consent for a lower interest rate. The same task could seek permission for longer repayment terms or bad-credit loans, or route the request for quick processing within an identified time range for special borrowers. Alternatively, permission to cancel or to process payment could be sought.

Business rules are typically connected to underlying applications, but they can be flexible. Authorized users can easily re-define rules using the BPM module. If a borrower is late on payments, BPM allows users to move them elsewhere within the application by simply dragging or dropping them, or authorized users may access and keep tabs on loan-processing information online.

This flexibility allows companies to optimize processes. By analyzing workflow results (e.g., customer complaints on a new product launch), companies can tighten loopholes, eliminate superfluities, take action on products, increase inventory or provide additional training to CRM staff. Companies also can analyze workflow to achieve greater efficiency in end-end processing, by overcoming delays caused by external sources (i.e., customers). Workflow data also can be captured to comply with statutory requirements and standards.

Conclusion

Workflow works best with integration in a BPM environment, because it determines how processes connect beyond the boundaries of different applications throughout the company. This integration, when analyzed by using Business Applications Management (BAM), provides valuable workflow feedback. When that feedback is re-fed into the company's business rules it promotes workflow performance, boosts productivity, cuts costs and increases profits. The company can then reach its full growth potential.

Automating workflow allows companies to better manage processes in a BPM environment by giving them greater flexibility to balance and route workloads and processes. Companies with this flexibility can make real-time changes to become proactive at all levels. Finally, automation permits companies to measure performance against goals and expectations, and thereby improve their processes to achieve both.