Business Process Design

A good business idea is just that - an idea. What turns a good business idea into a good business, are good business systems.

Business systems are effcient processes, utilizing supporting technology. Technology that:

• captures customer requirements - orders
• procures resources to meet customer requirements - supply
• associates requirements to business products - fulfilment
• manages business transactions - delivery and payment
• reports business performance - finance and operations
• stores and presents business data - information systems

Your business systems are the way you implement your business strategy. A popular methodology for achieving this is using Balanced Scorecard.

Business Process Design

Very few businesses set out to design business processs to implement their business strategy. Most often, business processes just 'happen' out of the consequence of completing business transactions. Too often however, these processes are clogged with unnecessary clutter, or are weak and inefficient, resulting in leakage of business profits

Good process design captures the functional requirements of the business and applies best practice methodology to ensure that every activity in the business is for a valued reason, achieves its objective first time, and utilizes minimal resource in its operation.

Business process design is the core of both business efficiency and effectiveness. It's about doing the right thing, in the right place, at the right time, and doing it the right way:

• Having the greatest strategy in the world is of little value, if it is not well implemented - EFFICIENCY
• Having a super efficient process is of equally little benefit, if it is supporting the wrong action - EFFECTIVENESS

Business Process Re-engineering [BPR]

To many, BPR only means cost cutting and head count reduction. Whilst these are typical outcomes of BPR, undergoing this business improvement activity can mean gains to the revenue line, as well as reduction to expenses.

A good business process is customer facing. If there is not a customer value, there is no process value. BPR is about maximising the value chains throughout your business so they are ALL customer facing - they are ALL contributing to the business objectives.

A bit like remodeling a house - it can be more costly than just starting from a fresh page. But the payback more than compensates for the short term pain. A BPR project involves four main steps:

1. Current Analysis - mapping of all your current business processes, current issues, technology used, timelines, resources consumed. This provides you with a clear understanding of 'WHERE YOU ARE NOW'
2. Ideal Design - working with your staff to design the best possible process to achieve desired outcomes in the least possible time, with the least resource cost. If new technology is required, a functional requirement is specified, and a vendor selection process undertaken. This is your 'WHERE YOU WANT TO BE'
3. Implementation - mapping the changes to a step by step project plan, then working with your staff to make the desired changes. This may or may not mean the introduction of new technology. Your 'HOW TO GET THERE'
4. Ongoing Improvement - customer markets are constantly evolving, at speeds that seem to be increasing every year. If you business is not continually evolving with the needs of your customers, you face either losing customers or not being able to fulfil their needs. Continuous Process Improvement is as much about ensuring processes evolve to meet new requirements, as it is about maintaining process standards. 'DO I STILL WANT TO GET THERE?' and 'AM I STILL TAKING THE BEST ROUTE'

Business Process Management

The well worded adage - what gets measured, gets done certainly applies to business processes. Business Process Management is a discipline, often supported by simple technology. There are many views on how businesses should be measured. Of course, the appropriate measurement depends upon the type of product or service produced. Manufacturing process measurements can involve detailed calculation and measurement tools. In most other types of business, it is not as complicated as many managers are lead to believe. There are potentially only 24 items of data needed to be collected, and by feeding these into a simple reporting tool, such as an Executive Dashboard, business managers can easily identify if, where and by how much a business process is meeting target objectives.

BPM and SOA

SOA is a design for linking business and computing resources [organizations, applications and data] on demand to achieve desired results for service consumers.

BPM is regarded a 'killer app' for Service Oriented Architecture [SOA]. Too often in the past, applications based solely on object oriented models were technology focused, rather than service focused. SOA is attempting to return the purpose of applications to support business process outcomes, by freeing them from the underlying architecture, and aligning them to best-practice process models.

Reuse is central to the concept of SOA, but reuse can involve risk. Replacing a process that exists in multiple applications (in slightly different forms) with a single Web service does eliminate redundancy, but it also creates a single point of failure. Getting members of an organization to trust such a service isn't easy, but the automobile industry may provide a model: the certified pre-owned vehicle. What makes people trust what was once derogatorily called a "used car" is a "visible, objective and quantifiable quality process."

Computer Processes

Computers also rely on processes; a program or command running on the computer. Certain methodologies such as Rational Unified Process®, or RUP®, are used during software development to help you deliver customized and consistent process guidance to project teams.

If business processes are not well designed, then computer processes, in their attempt to support these business processes will suffer inefficiencies also.

Bridging the IT : Business Divde

Did you know that a recent survey showed that 75% of corporate strategy requires implementation by IT, yet on 31% of IT Managers are consulted in setting corporate strategy. This is a clear indication that Boards have yet to embrace how vital technology is to their ongoing growth and survival. And also how frustrating it is for IT Managers to be heard.

A key strength of Coded Vision Consulting is bridging the technology: commerce divide. As experienced stategists and implementers of both technology AND marketing, Coded Vision consultants will help break down executive barriers to technology and faciliate the voice of IT managers to the board.

IBM Innov8 Business Process Game

Innov8: A BPM Simulator, is an immersive, 3-D educational game simulator designed to bridge the gap in understanding between IT teams and business leaders in an organization. This screen shot shows one of the characters standing in the lobby of the virtual office environment.

View Video Demo of IBM Innov8

Investing in optimizing and streamlining those processes offers you a promising Return on Investment (ROI) opportunity with a clear focus on meeting business goals.

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