Business Process Management Essay: Benefits, Implementation Phases, And Risks.

Objective of Implementing BPM

Discuss about the Business Process Management.

Business Process Management plays a crucial role in the modern days of any business organisation. There are number of advantages of implementing a BPM solution with an integrated composition environment in the organisation.  SAP NetWeaver is the popular BPM software that provides facilities to analyse the business process and reduce the human effort and work and save precious time of any business. The SAP NetWeaver provides easy access to business rules and process, e.g., in the form of decision tables.

The implementation of BPM reduces the human efforts and provides accurate analysis and strong decision-making power to  management about any particular problem related to business process (Khan, 2017). BPM enables the organisation to update and improve its business organisation easily and rapidly. The SAP NetWeaver supports real-time optimization of process execution, provide boost behind the business event-processing that can trigger interactive or automated process adjustments.  

We can define the following issues are major causes behind implementing BPM in the organisation:

1. Customer Service Issues
2. Cost of Daily Operations
3. Low Productivity of Employees
4. Technological Advancements
5. Increasing Competition in the Industry
6. Infrastructure of Organisation

There are five phases in BPM system implementation in a business organisation:

This is the first phase where all the business process evaluates and analyses by the top management. A formal project team inspect all the business process where SAP NetWeaver can be used and set a clearly defined objective for every business process and develop a project plan.    

The project team then review the capabilities of SAP NetWeaver which take 3-5 days. The project team inspect and analyse SAP NetWeaver on every aspect and provide training to the other concern member who connected in the implementation phase. The team develop standard operating procedures (SOP’s) and they should make sure that they modify the document according to their SOPs change (Mandelling, Baesens, Bernstein, & Fellmann, 2017).

This is the third phase of BPM implementation and most crucial in all. Proper implementation of the system is necessary for successful BPM implementation. The project team needs several rounds of training to implement the SAP NetWeaver in the organisation. The several rounds of testing needed for finally implementing the SAP NetWeaver in the organisation. 

This is the fourth phase where SAP team converted and collected pat data and creates spreadsheets to collect and segment the data into logical tables. After all, data collected and manually collected data is entered into the system, the team analyse the output of the SAP NetWeaver and reviews output given by the software. In this phase, the BPM project team analyse every output of the software and useless data and information and weed out it. 

Driving forces of BPM

Proper care and updates are necessary after the successful implementation of BPM solution in the organisation. It should not be considered that it is a definite beginning and end after the successful installation of the SAP NetWeaver. The SAP NetWeaver needs time to time update and optimisation in the features of the software that meet the future requirement of the organisation.

Implementation of BPM software in the business organisation requires planning, excellent communication, and pure hard work of the project team. Once people see their ideas into reality and process become optimized, they will realize the importance of BPM solution and know what it exactly does. 

There are few risks always threats business organisation after implementation of BPM software in the organisation. These risks are as follows:

It is human nature that they always resist changes in their personal and professional life. An employee who previously worked on paper and have no idea of technology or SAP NetWeaver, always resist the implementation of it and does not see the benefits of technology (Paschek, Draghici, & Lvascu, 2018). Such employees will delay in implementation as much as possible. The management needs to aware them about the benefits of SAP and provides training that mitigates such type of risks.

The business process governance also called process governance which involves setting standards and priorities for BPM process and efforts. The major goal of process governance is to minimize the work efforts in the organisation and make workflow more effective and efficient. Process governance involves to set a centralize BPM centre of excellence to ensure effective workflow and compare the actual results with the set standard and spread awareness of BPM standards and priorities (Harris, 2016)). Audit reviews and process governance monitor all the business process and prepare documents on the basis of monitoring these business processes, success, or shortcomings.

Most of the business organisation now in these days using ERP or sales  management software, and if the BPM platform is failed to integrate with these systems, then it is more possible that your BPM implementation is more likely to fail. SAP NetWeaver provide such facilities and allowing the business organisation to easily move data from ERP software to SAP NetWeaver and vice-versa.   

The SAP NetWeaver platform allows the business organisation to model your own business process according to the need of the organisation and modify according to demand of the time (Unertl, Novak, Johnson, & Lorenzi, 2011). During the implementation process of SAP, it should be ensured by the project team that one should not implement any process too rigidly. It is important for the BPM project team to consider corner cases, i.e. cases where process-flow the norm. The implementation process should be flexible and enough to further changes in any process if required.

Phases in Implementing BPM

The big problem with the BPM systems that they are not for the lifetime rather they will definitely be absolute after a certain period when new and advanced technology will be launched. This risk cannot be mitigated by the business organisation, only they can update of the current system can fight with this risk. But after some time the organisation has to adopt a new BPM tool for the business process advancement.

Conclusion

The BPM systems help the business organisation to modernize the business process by replacing the manual work from advance technological automatic business processes such as SAP NetWeaver. The SAP NetWeaver helps the business organisation to analyse the business process and give it models according to their own need. The SAP NetWeaver can easily integrate with other ERP and Sales management software that provide facilities to integrate the BPM system with the existing business process of the organisation. We can say that the BPM is the necessity of modern business organisation that provides the capacity to reduce time and cost by analytically documenting, managing, automating and optimising the business process.

Business Process Analysis (BPA) can be defined as an analysis of the various business operation and processes or series of the related task, where a BPM system observe all these processor functions of the organisation and ensures the proper execution, management and analysis to reduce the cost and time. BPA uses techniques such as automation of work and simulation and mining, and the organisation's management gain a deep insight into both current and business operations (Groover, 2008). The business process analytics provides a deep insight into various organisational processes to its stakeholders such as process participants, employees, employers, decision makers etc.

Business Process Model Notification (BPMN) is a technique of BPA that was developed by Business Process Management Initiatives (BPMI) that provides analysis of different business processes by a graphical notation in a Business Process Diagram (Shapiro, White, Bock, Palmer, ZurMuehlen, Brambilla, & Gagne, 2011). The BPMN based on the flowcharting technique, which is similar very similar to activity diagrams. The primarily objective of BPMN is to provide helps in analysis of various business processes to both technical users and business users. The BPMN specification also provides a mapping between the graphical notation and underlying causes constructs of execution languages, particularly Business process execution languages (Rosemann & Brocke, 2014).

Flow objects: It shows activity, events, and gateways.

Governance Process for BPM change and managing its stakeholders

Connecting objects: Connecting objects represents sequence flow, message flow and connections.

Swim Lanes: A Swim lanes show the pool or lane between two nodes.

Artifacts: Artifacts represent the data object, groups and annotations.

Yet Another Workflow Language (YAWL) is a workflow language based on workflow patterns that are working on the analysis of workflow management and workflow languages used in various business processes in the business organisation. The YAWL is based on the formal semantics which helps in the implementation of several techniques for analysing YAWL processes. YAWL is supported by a software system that includes an execution engine (Hofstede, Van der Aalst, Adams, & Russel, 2010). The YAWL was developed by the Eindhoven University of Technology (EUT) and Queensland University of Technology (QUT). The Petri nets assumed to be an alternative of YAWL. The designers of YAWL consider to take Petri nets as a starting point and extend this formalise with the three major constructs, namely or-join, cancellation sets, and multi instance-activities (JianHong, 2010). The YAWL supports advanced resource allocation policies, including four-eyes principle and changed execution.

Applying these BPM tools is not an easy task. It has to face different types of challenges and difficulties during the implementation and operation phase of these analytical tools.

1. Integration with other pre-existing systems is a difficult task during the implementation and operation process in the business organisation. It is tough to coordinate all the business processes with the system automation.
2. Employee's fears of Job cut while some automaton system results in the fire of employees from the organisation and that force them to resist the change.
3. BPA needs monitoring during replacing human and documented works with the automation process. It is important to perform honest analysis and monitoring of cost and productivity benefits. This needs pre-automation set standards that serve as a benchmark for the future automation process results, and it could easily be compared with the past performance.

Involvement of employees in the business process management and its implementation can be more useful for the organisation. The organisation can involve the different level of peoples in business process automation and provide training to operate such automation systems. This action of management can reduce the recruitment and training cost of new employees and it can also be helpful in improving the efficiency of the different business process in the organisation.

The feasibility study is practically is an assessment and analysis of the proposed project or system that has to be implemented in the organisation. A business organisation has to check the feasibility of implementing a BPM improvement system on the following basis:

The technical feasibility study helps the business organisation to check the technical competence of the business organisation that it could handle the project implementation or not. At this phase, both human and economic factor are considered during technical feasibility (Georgakellos & Marcis, 2009).

The legal feasibility inspects and analyses that whether the proposed system conflicts with the legal requirements. As an example the data processing system in SAP NetWeaver is not complying with the local data protection regulations then it the installation of this system in the organisation will be illegal.

Risk Management in BPM Implementation Phase

The financial feasibility helps the organisation to assess the total cost of implementing a new BPM system in the organisation. The organisation assesses the cost and benefit analysis after the proposal of implementing a new business improvement system in the organisation (Beecker, 2018). If the cost of the software is too high that could not be possible for the organisation to achieve in next few years, then it will be useless for the organisation to implement costly BPM system in the business organisation.

Operational feasibility checks how well a BPM system solves the problems, and how it satisfied the requirements of the organisation by its output (Mesly, 2017). The operational feasibility analysis should be focused on how well and to what extent the proposed system performs in the existing business environment and is it capable in achieving the organisation objective or not.

A project will fail if it takes too much time to complete the task. Thus, it is essential to know how long the system will take to develop and it can be completed with the required time frame or not. Schedule feasibility is helpful to measure the reasonable time-table of the project and analyse the feasibility that it could be beneficial for the business organisation or not.

In the end, we can say that Business Process Management (BPM) system is a need of the large organisation having tedious manual work process and they are still working on documenting work. The BPM systems help the business organisations to modernize the business process by replacing the manual work from advance automatic business processes systems such as SAP NetWeaver. The SAP NetWeaver helps the business organisation to analyse the business process and give it models according to their own need and demands. Although, it is so costly for the small business organisation no one denies that it is need of the modern time to implement BPM systems in the organisation and replace the manual and documented work with automation work.

References

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