What is Business Process Management? 

What is Business Process Management? (BPM) 

Business Process Management can be seen as a composite discipline between business administration and organizational psychology. In BPM you analyse how your work processes and the tasks, authortities and cooperation of employees within these processes can be improved. BMP covers the entire lifecycle of all your business processes; from identifying, developing, designing and implementing processes to the execution, management, control, analysis and improvement of all your processes. By doing this you focus on the continuous improvement of all your business processes and aim to ultimately create higher quality throughout your entire business structure and/or business chain. 

In short, BPM provides an answer to the question; what is exactly happening in my organization? 

Different business processes 

If you look at the organizational level, there are three different types of business processes: 

• The primary processes, also called core processes: these processes relate to the production and processing of a service/product of your organization for an external customer. 
• The secondary processes, also called supporting business processes: these processes relate to prerequisites that must be effectively carried out on all other processes by an internal customer. Think of the departments IT, HR or financial administration.  
• The tertiary processes, also called controlling processes: these processes focus on planning, control, reporting, evaluation and adjusting the organization of all processes. 

When you apply integral process management within your company structure, this means that you will clearly structure the above processes, completely control them and use these insights to continuously adapt your processes and/or change them where necessary. However, this is only possible if you see your organization as a united whole of processes regarding execution, continuous improvement and renewal. 

With effective Business Process Management you can, therefore, optimize your processes so you can control your lead time, costs, risks and the quality of your processes. Due to the grip you create on your organization when you effectively execute BPM, we now see that many more organizations are investing their time in BPM.

The role of the RASCI method

Each process consists of people who have different tasks and responsibilities within this process. With BPM it is crucial to clarify these responsibilities and authorities in order to have a process carried out as effectively possible. In order to avoid ambiguity and to ensure that everyone knows what they have to do, our module the Process Manager uses thé famous method for role division; the RASCI method. The RASCI Method stands for:

Responsible (the one responsible)

Accountable (final responsible party/person)

Supportive (support)

Consulted (the person consulted)

Informed (the person informed)

With RASCI you provide everyone within the process with a clear division of roles to increase, clarity, efficiency and reduce ambiguity.

Read more about RASCI here.

Process-oriented thinking and steering

You're not there yet if you only implement BMP; effective BMP also needs a switch in your organizations' mindset with regards to process-oriented thinking and steering. Of course this mindset is centered around the process and carefully considering all process aspects that are important. A process-oriented organization does not only focus on individual departments, but on the entire chain of processes which is often divided over several departments. This means that possible changes, problems and ideas will arise as a result of the implementation of process management. These new ideas, problems and changes can be used for optimizing the working method across multiple departments. A process-oriented organization thus collects issues, solves these issues immediately and translates these into structural improvements. At INBISCO we offer the IRIS module that allows quality and deviation registrations throughout your entire organization and that helps you with implementing BPM, but also a process oriented mindset. IRIS allows you to act immediately on possible problems or ideas in your organization and implement these immediately in your processes.

Read more about IRIS here.

Quality management & Business Process Management

By applying BPM to your organization you also indirectly improve the quality of your service/product. Integration of business processes, therefore, not only helps you to perform more efficiently, but also to improve your service to your customers. As in a process-oriented organization you focus on the collection of quality and deviation registrations, you make your processes more flexible for improvement and you can thus manage the quality of your business operations.

Would you like to know more about how our modules can help you implement BPM effectively in your business structure? Contact us and request a free demo for our Process Manager and IRIS modules!