Implementing BPM

Business Process Management (BPM) is the platform for turbo charging your organization. At its core, BPM integrates processes across the value chain and aligns them with organizational strategy. BPM leverages proven methodologies such as BPR, Lean and Six Sigma to drive meaningful reductions in cycle time, errors, and re-work. These reductions have a direct and measureable impact on service levels, quality, and cost of delivery. But rather than using these methodologies in an ad hoc or project-specific manner, BPM embeds continuous business improvement into your organization's DNA.

What are the measureable results you get from BPM?

• Better services delivered at lower costs
• More satisfied customers
• Engaged employees

In addition to these measureable benefits, organizations that embrace BPM as the "way they work" are naturally more agile and therefore better able to adapt to increasingly challenging internal and external forces.

How to establish BPM in your organization

1. Define Your Objectives - Many organizations confuse their employees with too many initiatives, programs, and objectives. The best approach is simplicity. Three to four major objectives are what most people can handle. It also makes it easier to communicate to employees.
2. Clarify Your Strategy - With only 3 or 4 major objectives, it's easier to focus and to develop workable strategies. Your strategy should be clearly defined, over communicated, and have measureable milestones. Without objective measures, it's hard to know whether you're really making progress. Progress toward achieving objectives also keeps employees energized.
3. Communicate - Many organizations rely on email to communicate. But this is perhaps the least effective medium because our inboxes are already overflowing. Use email sparingly and reinforce messages with formal and informal presentations, webinars, and even phone calls. Strategy should be clearly communicated to unleash the power of all employees pulling together to achieve objectives.
4. Map Value Chain - Identify the parts of your organization's value chain that enfeeble rather than enable your strategy.
5. Reinforce Weak Links - Carve out specific projects to reinforce the weakest links in your Value Chain. These projects can be small or large in scope. The important point is to ensure focused effort to address vulnerabilities in the Value Chain.
6. Lean, Six Sigma, and BPR - These techniques are proven and when used appropriately, will yield meaningful results. Each has its place. BPR can be very useful for rationalizing dysfunctional processes, but is less useful with more complex problems of variability and defects. When variability is the challenge, Six Sigma techniques, with their reliance on data and statistical rigor, are a great way to drive to root cause. And if long cycle times are choking your organization's capacity, Lean Value Stream Maps are very useful for identifying waste in the system.