A Business process comprises of numerous interrelated activities carried out in a manner that would help achieve the overall organizational goal. These activities are critical to management because they affect the revenues realized and costs incurred in the organization. Therefore, to be effective, management must incorporate appropriate management tools, which include business process management (BPM) and Total quality management (TQM).
BPM states that processes are the most important assets of the organization and therefore the need to carefully design, manage, and improve them to add value to the services and products offered to the client. This principle is shared with TQM or continuous improvement (CI) processes, which emphasize on quality services at costs to maximize customer satisfaction while enhancing shareholders wealth.
Also, BPM recommends that the processes be embedded with technology so as enhance the capacity of management to handle change and stress, which arise from the fast change in consumer, needs. BPM offers an exceptional benefit to the business as it focuses on improving organizational efficiency by simulating appropriate modifications to processes based on actual business information.
Similarly, TQM advocates for continuous improvement in all organizational processes that emphasizes teamwork and active participation from all players. In conclusion, BPM is similar to continuous improvement process, which is the essence of TQM because both emphasize on quality improvement believing that if the organization fails, someone would also fail and therefore jeopardizing the business’ success.
Also, both hold that employees are important in the processes that rely on intuition and judgments for effective operations. BPM life cycle goes through five distinct stages including designing, modeling, executing, monitoring, and optimization.
Design
Implementation of BPM starts by identification of the current processes, which are then evaluated against the new processes to reveal the number of changes required. The process’ structural elements for evaluation include the activity chain, the players in the network, operating procedures, ongoing service contracts, and role hand-over procedures.
Once the process has been evaluated, management can then develop a good process design. A good design should help reduce the existing process inefficiencies and improve overall organizational performance.
Modeling
When a good design has been developed, management would like the attempt to carry preliminary system tests for actual results, which would be compared with theoretical results to ascertain the suitability of the design for the organization. This stage is referred to as modeling, and it may employ “what if Analysis” which is run on the process.
Execution
After carrying out the “what if Analysis,” then the process is executed. To execute the process, the organization should acquire applications necessary for running the process. Human-system desegregation ensues through rigorous preparations which may include proper training and skill matching. Nevertheless, this process calls for pliant and well-structured infrastructure.
Monitoring
Monitoring refers to all mechanisms and measures installed to help in tracking activities in the process. This information should then be processed to help in improving the system and providing value-added service to the customers. The degree of monitoring depends on the information needs by the organizations, therefore, varies from organization to organization.
Optimization
During the optimization stage, administration gathers information available in monitoring and modeling stages and carries a thorough analysis of the information so obtained to point out any likely negative aspects or unused chances. Finally, the management comes up with the proper enhancements. The overall result of BPM would be increased business value.