Business Process Management (BPM)

Business process management (BPM) is an effective methodology for operations management, involving various methods to discover, model, analyse, measure, improve, optimise, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company’s business processes is BPM. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, enabling technologies are often used with BPM.

It can be differentiated from program management in that program management is concerned with managing a group of inter-dependent projects. From another viewpoint, process management includes program management. In project management, process management is the use of a repeatable process to improve the outcome of the project.

Key distinctions between process management and project management are repeatability and predictability. If the structure and sequence of work is unique, then it is a project. In business process management, a sequence of work can vary from instance to instance: there are gateways, conditions; business rules etc. The key is predictability: no matter how many forks in the road, we know all of them in advance, and we understand the conditions for the process to take one route or another. If this condition is met, we are dealing with a process.

As an approach, BPM sees processes as important assets of an organisation that must be understood, managed, and developed to announce and deliver value-added products and services to clients or customers. This approach closely resembles other total quality management or continual improvement process methodologies. ISO 9000 promotes the process approach to managing an organisation.

How can VCG help?

Ensuring organisational processes are optimised so that you can achieve more efficient results (and ultimately cut costs) is critical in business survival today.

TVCG empowers organisations to be more efficient, effective and flexible. Processes are viewed as strategic assets that need to be managed and improved to deliver value adding services and products. We can help you improve your operations through:

  • Current state process documentation and analysis: a process management strategy that identifies and evaluates a business’s current processes. Current state analysis can focus on an entire business organisation or on one or more specific processes within a department or team
  • Future-state design: a strategic process that anticipates the future and develops methods to effectively respond to new technologies, behaviours, regulatory, legal and any other changes that may arise
  • Business process re-engineering and optimisation involves completely changing the process for an overall different result, which is the opposite of incremental business process improvement. BPR aims at changing the way a process works while BPI is enhancing an existing process to optimise it
  • Process modelling and testing the activity of representing processes of an enterprise, so that current processes may be analysed, improved, automated, then piloted and tested for high user acceptance with proof of improved efficiency and ultimately, cost reduction
  • Process automation the use of technology to automate business processes to sequentially transition from one task to the next with minimal human intervention, resulting in increased productivity, reduced paperwork, streamlined processes and improved compliance

Find out how VCG can help deliver improved customer satisfaction through better products and services.

how can we help you?

VCG Digital has been instrumental in guiding our Digital change and BIM initiative. This has allowed us to invest objectively with an eye on value and focus on outcomes for the end-users”

Director
, a Water Utility organisation