BPM zlepšuje back-office

Martin Percival sa zameriava na dnešné middle a back-office agendy. Tie predstavujú najkomplikovanejšie systémy a pritom z veľkej časti rozhodujú o úrovni poskytovaných služieb. Sú často nedokumentované - presnejšie prax je odlišná od formálnej dokumentácie, nevyužíva možnosti automatizácie, je roztrieštená medzi viac oddelení, negarantuje zhodu. SOA síce ponúka jednoduché zrozumiteľné služby, ich účinnosť sa však prejaví až tým, že budú integrovane do optimalizovaných reťazcov. A uvádza príklad zo spoločnosti BP, kedy nasadenie systému BPMS radikálne zlepšilo back-office subproces schvaľovania a likvidácie faktúr.


Every business is essentially a collection of processes - some strategic, some tactical, but all necessary. And today's middle and back office processes are increasingly complex, full of deeper interactions across systems and dependent on more collaborative activities between users. But what exactly is a business process? Essentially it is defined as a set of coordinated activities, carried out either by people or automatically, that together deliver tangible value to the business when it is executed. Some examples of business processes include applying for a home loan (a loan origination process), starting a mobile phone service (an account initiation process), hiring a new employee (an employee on-boarding process), or even building a new jet engine (parts and assembly process).

Business Process Management (BPM) meanwhile is the discipline of managing and measuring the performance of a business against strategic goals through the formalisation of middle and back office business processes that describe how business is conducted as a set of coordinated activities. It often includes the use of technology to aid in modelling, execution and management of those processes.

Many of the typical challenges that business leaders are facing every day often relate to how the business is managing its middle and back office processes. These challenges might include a lack of visibility into how the business is run, because business processes are not documented, or real processes differ from documented processes. There may be issues regarding low productivity due to manual execution of processes that span divisional domains or are hard to otherwise automate. Customer satisfaction may be waning due to long response times, unhandled exceptions in customer processes, or complex, uncoordinated customer service. The organisation may be unable to launch new business tactics quickly to compete effectively or attack new opportunities. There may even be issues associated with complying with government, industry or internal regulations as well as service level agreements with customers and partners.

Improvements in productivity, compliance and quality of service
Every business is driven according to a set of business processes that explicitly or implicitly define how transactions are executed, records are kept, how customers are serviced and how to interact with suppliers. Parts of business processes take place inside IT systems while other parts are handled by humans. Whenever a process can be migrated from an informal and ad-hoc execution to a formalised sequence of steps that are executed as a program, the business can achieve great improvements in productivity, compliance and quality of service.

Therefore, enterprises are constantly seeking to formalise and automate business processes. However, the effort to automate processes can be very challenging as processes often span divisional domains and involve many different IT systems, based on different technologies and governed by different people. More importantly, the people who understand the business process are not the same people who understand the IT systems. Finally, when business processes are implemented as programs, it can be hard for the owners of the individual process to rapidly adapt and evolve the process since this involves complex interactions with the IT department and long development and test cycles.

SOA - a new era of business agility
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) promises to usher in a new era of business agility. SOA is an IT strategy that organises the discrete functions contained in enterprise applications into interoperable, standards-based services that can be combined and reused quickly to meet business needs. SOA has come a long way in providing a unified way for applications to interact with each other and to expose functionality as services using industry standards. Today many enterprises are rolling out SOA and achieving reduced costs of integration and more rapid development cycles. But these initiatives are mostly focused on efficiency and adaptability in IT. And the agility that SOA promises depends as much on supporting new efficiencies for people as it does on liberating access to systems and services.

It requires a different approach to truly realise the business value of SOA by empowering the line of business to create and easily modify business processes that are seamlessly deployed by IT. This is the role of BPM in the world of SOA, helping businesses attain that all elusive competitive edge through repeatable and predictable process, and compliance execution involving people and systems.

So how can BPM tackle those typical challenges business leaders face that were outlined earlier - lack of visibility, low productivity, indifferent customer satisfaction, or the inability to launch new business tactics quickly? BPM does it by focusing on all phases of the business process lifecycle. The first is the model. In many cases the solution starts with understanding and formalising the process itself. Enterprises often operate on ad-hoc processes that 'just work' but are not well described or well understood. With a formal and executable process model, the whole enterprise has a single point of reference. The second is execution. Even if the process model already exists, it is often the case that the executed process is not the same as the modelled process. Process execution must be automated and based on the same model asset that was used for modelling (what is called a shared model). That is the only way to ensure that the executed process is always the same as the modelled process.

The third way that BPM helps to deliver seamless process integration in the middle and back office is by measurement. Key performance indicators and other business metrics can be defined directly in the process model. As processes are executed, process owners continuously track these indicators to gain operational visibility and identify opportunities for optimisation. Finally, optimisation. Once the model-execute-measure loop is closed, the process model can be optimised based on measurements during execution, thereby enabling continuous process improvement.

BP takes the BPM road
Take the example of BP, the leading energy company. With annual sales of $262 billion, over 28,000 retail locations, 19 refineries in operation, and exploration activity in 26 countries, BP is a very large and complex company. As such, it is easy for routine tasks, like invoice processing, to become cumbersome and inefficient. Following a series of mergers and acquisitions in recent years, the lines of business within BP found themselves using a hodgepodge of invoicing systems and approval processes. With an average of 15,000 invoices in play at any one time, BP knew the current situation was not sustainable. At one point, up to 40 people were working full time to handle the task manually. As one might expect with a manual process, it was difficult to track where an invoice was at any given time. There were lots of job codes to remember, data had to be re-keyed into a master SAP system and, in general, there were many opportunities for human error and duplication of effort.

Following the implementation of an integrated BPM suite, the 'electronic approval process' (e-AP) went live seven months later. Staffing levels were cut from 40 people to five; integration between e-AP and SAP nearly eliminated the need for data re-entry, which increases data accuracy and eliminates processing bottlenecks. Reporting is available in real time to provide visibility into the payment process. The e-AP system is flexible and standards-based, allowing it to evolve with the changing needs of the business. And, BP is improving its relationships with key vendors by processing invoices in a timely manner and being able to tell vendors the exact status of any invoice.

BPM tools
So what tools does an organisation need in order to take control of business process management? The answer is a software product suite for creating, executing and optimising business processes. Such a suite enables unparalleled collaboration between business and IT with specialised design environments that enable efficient iterations by all the people involved in the process lifecycle. Business analysts can design and run simulations of a complete process without involving IT and only when the process fulfills the business specifications is it handed over to IT, who implement the necessary connectivity to existing IT systems and deploy the process. User interfaces for human interaction with the process can be generated automatically and provided as standards-based portlets by the execution environment. Real-time as well as historical data for processes can be collected by the server and made available in dashboards so that processes can be continuously optimised and activity data can be tracked by the business.

In the past, business process initiatives have often stalled on technology grounds. Now that SOA is gaining acceptance though, BPM software seems to have a bright future. With standards emerging for SOA design and deployment, and established vendors preparing the technology backbone, the foundations are being laid for BPM. Marrying BPM to SOA is set to unleash a new wave of process management and automation.