Introduction
Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) are both strategies used by businesses to meet their demands and goals to survive. BPM is a methodical approach of creating the processes of the organization more efficient, successful, and able to adjust to a diverse and active environment.
Usually, Business Process management serves as a connection inside the business between the Information Technology (IT) unit and line-of-business (LOB) (Maull & Tranfield, 2003, p. 561). Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) engages various changes in processes and structures inside the company setting and the entire business, human, and technological aspects can also be transformed in BPR.
Information Technology contributes greatly in activities of BPR since it offers office automation, permits the company to be executed in various locations, allows faster delivery to end users, elasticity or flexibility in manufacturing, and supports faster and automatic operation or transactions.
The difference between Business Process management and Business Process re-engineering is that BPR is a method, while BPM is system software. BPR reassess the processes applied by the business from the very basics and methodically remodels them, allowing businesses to create major developments in service, speed, and cost.
Business Process management is a notion constructed internally in a business that is permanent to control business processes (Biazzo, 2002, p. 43).
Winscribe, an international software and services company, implemented its BPM application in 2011 to help them eradicate unproductive practices among the world’s top legal firms and organizations (Rosemann, 2010, p. 201).
This company invested its BPM solution in Microsoft Infopath and SharePoint to continue its processes of eradicating unproductive practices and employ these solutions to reduce total expenses of possession, improve levels of customer receptiveness, and enhance operational competence.
This paper discusses the benefits and disadvantages of BPM and BPR, the processes of implementation, Critical Success factors, automation in companies, and the relationship between business processes and HR.
Advantages and Disadvantages of BPM and BPR
BPM creates it simple for enterprises to program their existing processes, mechanize their implementation, examine their existing performance, and create on-the-fly changes to advance the existing processes. BPM software allows the business to mechanize the work that presently being carried out manually.
Several assignments need different kinds of application process, dismissal or approval process, performance and notification reports, and BPM software can create these processes mechanical or computerized (Rosemann, 2010, p. 201).
Apart from the insufficient facts to support the alleged advantages of process management, there are facts that process management may, in some instances, be damaging to companies. This can be explained that BPM has a trend to restrict innovations and these innovations that happen through BPM are often just incremental.
This denotes that radical innovations are improbable to happen in a business applying BPM. Businesses using BPM will be less effective during stages of rapid change than businesses that do not apply BPM (Rosemann, 2010, p. 201).
The intention of Business Process Re-engineering is to support firms to identify outmoded processes, items, or employees in a firm process and promotes workers’ involvement and productivity.
The knowledge by the employees about the processes that are focused can point out flaws and provide suggestions for improvement. Firms employ process re-engineering for different motives, including reducing expenses and enhancing entire input (Rosemann, 2010, p. 201).
The drawback of BPR is that some employees may not adjust to the BPR transformations and those allocated new roles may become overpowered. Some employees can also become outdated if their key role is substituted due to the renovation of the process (Rosemann, 2010, p. 201).
Some manufacturing businesses may not benefit since they may not possess the option of reforming processes without affecting the security and quality or value of their product.
Critical Success Factors of BPM and BPR
Business Process Re-engineering often changes the manner a business operates and the higher management should be engaged in the project for the firm to function properly. Therefore, it needs leadership, finance, and resources; all three that higher management can offer to implement such changes.
The objectives of a BPR must be in proportion to the firm’s strategic target and if the firm’s goals are not similar to the goals of a BPR, output decelerates or holds back since not every party engaged in the project will have the same idea and direction (Khosrowpour, 2006, p. 51).
Re-engineering groups must be active, diverse, and somewhat small (below 10 participants) and have to include some participants who are aware of the project, some members who do not have the knowledge about the project, other from the outside the business, technology professions, and different customers (Biazzo, 2002, p. 43).
The people engaged in Business Process Management perspective are individuals and teams that constantly improve and employ their process associated understanding and expertise.
People are among the central components in the business process change because processes have to be carried out by people in the company or business. In addition, this factor may be explained by two secondary factors, these are skills, responsibilities, roles, and management of people.
Insufficient proper project management is a major challenge that companies are undergoing during the implementation of BPM. It is the area of managing, securing, organizing, and planning resources to result in the effective and efficient achievement of particular engineering project objectives and goals (Biazzo, 2002, p. 43).
The Information Technology (IT) architecture is a planned group of agreement decisions on guidelines and standards, common solutions and services, principles and policies, together with particular sell commodities employed by Information Technology providers both internal and external of the ITB (Information Technology Branch) (Khosrowpour, 2006, p. 51).
The process performance has to be evaluated accurately to classify them with the benchmarks and objectives, and select the proper process along with evaluation of the improvement.
Challenges to Successful Implementation of BPM
One key challenge experienced during implementations of BPM is the extensive scope of the majority BPM projects. BPM goes beyond organizational and technological boundaries and this brings about a higher likelihood of domestic political and territory wrangles, as well as feature creep.
Insufficient understanding about BPM has been identified as the leading barrier to adoption of BPM (Kernland, Hoeffleur and Felber, p. 2).
Building consensus over the methodology and terminology is among the major challenges since, normally, every member will be in the negotiation table with his or her personal descriptions of what a process appears like.
Instead of just making a start from a process change perspective or systems perspective, members in a Business Process Management implementation should establish a common range of conditions to make sure that they are being reliable regarding what precisely what they imply (Biazzo, 2002, p. 43).
One greatest challenge for organization trying to implement BPM is that they do not understand where to start. Insufficient visibility into business processes and inadequate understanding of the functions of the organization bring about this improbability of uncertainty.
The governing processes, which take process knowledge and preserve them, are not present or badly controlled. Other than the common challenges of change management, implementing BPM provides several barriers that are caused by misunderstandings (Kernland, Hoeffleur and Felber, p. 2).
Another challenge of implementation of BPM is the complexity of obtaining buy-in from the organization’s shareholders and the other reason is the difficulty during validation of ROI of an initiative. Some business managers do not have the enough understanding concerning BPM and the benefits to their companies (Khosrowpour, 2006, p. 51).
The Role of HR in BPM
Business process management is intended to combine the areas of Information Technology and Human Resources. BPM provides the map and sets up goals while HR offers the background to make people responsible for those implemented goals.
The business should understand the role of Human resources to bring about major success to the firm (Khosrowpour, 2006, p. 51). The firm should understand that major changes in the business process bring about changes in job description and productivity probabilities.
HR can support when choosing the changes that are important enough to a significant influence on job descriptions and may establish those performance measures that create a variation to performance appraisal. Likewise, major changes in the business processes can cause transformation in hiring of workers and will probably signify substantial change in management and regulation.
Alternatively, Human Resources Management offers the momentum and human resource structure for the successful and efficient roll-out of solutions of Business Process Management. This may be simply observed when business processes are reassessed, reformed, and realigned to attain the intentions and criteria of the firm.
While Business Process management automates, enhances, and incorporates business processes, HRM makes sure that the above are being implemented and examined by experienced workforce (Kernland, Hoeffleur and Felber, p. 3).
HR practices and roles should be used to monitor the processes and developments of the business processes to evaluate if there is a need for any strategy to be introduced or if some employees should be deployed in these areas to provide quality work.
Process Automation and Innovation
Enhancement of business process using automation is a field that Information Technology unit can create an impact, while also offering a case of competence to the other units of the company. The solution is to automate the proper kind of routine tasks to recognize new efficiencies, enhance technician output and attain a methodical approach to functions.
For instance, IT automation platform may substitute several tiresome manual internal processes that consist of updating software, executing asset management, application deployments, performing defrag, assessing passwords, and updating patches on applications of workers in the business environment, along with regulatory compliance, endpoint protection, and different applications that are most important and carried out frequently in the business (Maull & Tranfield, 2003, p. 561).
For instance, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank implemented the use of business automation solutions and has been creating continuous investment in its Information Technology system.
Business automation solutions have helped them take a holistic and comprehensive analysis of all processes and allow continuous and total automation processes. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank used automation process to manage Account Opening process (Khosrowpour, 2006, p. 51).
Business Process management solution has been used in the bank in several areas including card management, SMS system, and core banking System. The number of the computers or desktops that may be contained in every help desk worker punctuated the significance of the automation practiced in most businesses.
Change Management
The accountability or the role of the owner is to be the supporter for their domain all through the change management process and in that manner, all sections of the organization, regardless of how small, play a role. If there is any part or element that is invariable or stagnant in the current business, it is the need for a change within the business.
But as every firm or IT management understand all too well, a poorly controlled change may possess severe effects. This is the reason that successful management is very important to change management, particularly where Business Process Management is concerned (Biazzo, 2002, p. 43).
Some claim that implementing new strategies or ideas, such as the implementation of BPM and BPR, is a change process and it needs not just a transfer of understanding, but also instituting a dissimilar behaviour (Khosrowpour, 2006, p. 51).
Therefore, organizations must not consider the technical features of implementations, for example the growth of a new IT system to promote the change, but also regarding if individuals are still finely positioned in the organization, and if they are adequately trained to manage the change. This requires substantial time and concentration in a change process.
The implementation of Business Process management needs a complete new approach of operating in an organization and entails appearing in a different way at the organization. This is a thing that several organizations undervalue. Aged, present approach of working, and managing employees should be changed.
This request a clear change at stage of management, but it also needs change at other minor or lower organization stages.
There is a need for a change in supervision and management and both should be performed over the whole process (horizontal) instead of doing on a hierarchical background. Consideration should be provided to the process rather than maintaining the department up and running (Biazzo, 2002, p. 43).
Summary
Businesses have no option and have only an option of addressing the issues of business processes. However, they do not have an option of the way to develop and control them.
They may adopt Business Process Re-engineering and Business Process Re-engineering using passive technological approach that brings about mixture of processes that incorrectly joined with costly ERP approach, manual workforce, and point solutions; or they may use an innovative, well-organized, and rational strategy that awards major competitive advantages.
BPM provides an extremely dominant or strong rage of abilities that have an impact on almost every part of the business.
Particularly, BPM implementation success may be very challenging and difficult and possess some success factors that change continuously while the abilities and priorities are changing and those in dissimilar contextual conditions, such as project purpose, and maturity and size of organization (Maull & Tranfield, 2003, p. 561).
However, the generalization and description of the major and important critical success factors are interesting for a start.
When the company agrees to implement BPR, BPM, and process improvements, they should not just focus on the new chances and the factors that encourage effective implementation, but they should also pay attention to the limitations and restrictions.
These limitations or challenges are usually bound to the culture and practises of the organization, to protection somebody receives from getting a particular position, and to status and authority. Management should manage these challenges and dynamically manage also the factors that encourage implementation.
List of References
Biazzo, S 2002, ‘Process mapping techniques and organisational analysis’, Business Process Management Journal, vol. 8 no. 1 pp. 42-52.
Kernland, M, Hoeffleur, O & Felber, M 2008, ‘The Agility Challenge in Business Process Management’, Product Data Journal, vol. 4 no. 1, pp. 1-4.
Khosrowpour, M 2006, Cases on Information Technology And Business Process Re-engineering, Idea Group Inc (IGI), London.
Maull, R & Tranfield, D 2003, ‘Factors characterising the maturity of BPR programmes’, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, vol. 23 no. 6, pp. 597-625.
Rosemann, M 2010, Handbook on Business Process Management 2: Strategic Alignment, Governance, People and Culture, Springer, Brisbane.