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Business Process and Automated Workflow
BizPartner™ Process Modeler Downloads
BPM has evolved from workflow and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). Workflow is defined as the automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules. Workflow is based heavily on the concept of tasks and interactions between individuals. EAI on the other hand is concerned with the interaction of two or more business applications. BPM is a merger of the capabilities of workflow and EAI so that companies can automate processes that require person to person, person to system, and system to system interactions.
Solutions: Challenges of Manual Processes
Business applications have made tremendous strides in automating major portions of corporations today from MRP systems to self-service HR. But despite all this automation there still remain many manual processes in most firms. A few examples include:
- Expense report writing and filing
- Personal Action Notices that change the records in one's personnel file
- Processing orders to smaller suppliers for whom an EDI connection is unthinkable
- Responding to RFIs
- Paper based field reports that require subsequent manual entry into systems
- Document Change Orders
- Budgeting and capital appropriations
- Processing of customer claims
- Bug reports for software or hardware
- Getting order entry data reconciled with opportunity data in a CRM system
Relying on paper based or manual processes can be a source of hidden costs or lack of flexibility and efficiency in an organization:
- With manual processes it is difficult to measure the inefficiencies in the system and therefore impossible to get any planned improvement in cycle time or cost reductions
- Many business applications limit their functionality to supporting a single department resulting in islands of automation with little ability for automated interaction by groups outside of the department
- Legacy systems are tucked away in a corner and still operate on some part of the business but fail to connect electronically to any other part of the business
- Data is screen-scraped from one system and entered into another
- Some parts of a process are automated while other parts remain manual and are therefore more error prone
- Paper based policies are very difficult to enforce and thereby increase the vulnerability of the company
- Your existing solutions won't scale as the business grows because the manual processes won't scale effectively
- Parts of the processes are undocumented and havoc reigns when a key person is out or leaves the company
- The source of costly errors can be untraceable and are frequently erroneously attributed to technology rather than process and people
- Issues arise which require immediate decisions but do not become apparent fast enough, resulting in delays, costly reparations, and customer dissatisfaction
- Your existing software that automates many parts of a larger process fails to support some key features that you need to achieve the ROI you expected
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