Business Process Modeling is becoming a higher priority for business managers and analysts as there is an increasing emphasis in organizations to document, understand and improve their business processes. Managers and business owners are realizing that operating their businesses without well documented processes is just like a pilot who is flying blind without properly functioning instruments and navigation. Well documented and streamlined processes are essential in a smooth functioning of a team as they help ensure consistency, trackability and focus towards a shared goal. Business Process Modeling is a combination of various process related steps such as Process Mapping, Process Discovery, Process Simulation, Process Analysis and Process Improvement. Although a holistic business process modeling exercise would cover all these steps in some depth, analysts have found that even a partial modeling exercise that involves a subset of these steps is a good start and yields significant benefits. Business process modeling provides important benefits to companies and organizations such as the ones listed below. (1) Align Operations with Business Strategy Implementing a business strategy or a new business model requires changes in the operations and in how people perform their work. This can be affected only by operationalizing the business changes to the actual business processes, business rules and decisions that are made on a day to day basis by all the people in the organization. Business Process Modeling facilitates this by helping:
(2) Improve Process Communication One area that distinguishes successful businesses and teams is that they have a very clear idea of what they are supposed to do, how they are supposed to do it and what is the exact role of every team member. Clear communication of the operational processes is critical to facilitate a smooth functioning of a team. Business Process Modeling enables the documenting and communicating of the organizations business processes:
(3) Increase Control and Consistency Organizations and companies that succeed are ones that ensure their business processes and rules are well designed and that they are consistently applied the same way every single time. This process control and consistency is key for success in organizations ranging from fast-food chains to hospitals to NASA Space Shuttle operations. Business Process Modeling makes this possible by helping:
(4) Improve Operational Efficiencies In today's business environment, every business and every manager wants to ensure that they are achieving the best possible results with the resources available to them. There is no room for inefficiencies and wastage. The Process simulation and analysis steps of Business Process Modeling are critical tools for managers and analysts to ensure that their processes are optimized and are running like a well-oiled machine:
(5) Gain Competitive Advantage All the benefits mentioned above lead to a significant competitive advantage for an organization that has invested the time and effort to document, simulate and improve its business processes. Studies of many wildly successful companies has often shown that their success was not due to better ideas or better business models but because they invested significantly in business process modeling to constantly refine and improve their processes. A slight improvement in one activity here and another one there leads to an overall better process and as that process is executed repeatedly in the day-to-day running of the business it makes an organization much more efficient and better than its competitors. A business that has aligned its operations to its strategy, is agile, that has control over its processes, is running efficiently and has well trained staff is indeed at the top of its game. Author: Deepak Singh is the President and CTO at AccuProcess Inc. AccuProcess a visual, easy-to-use business process modeling software that helps business people document, simulate and improve their business processes. To promote its vision for a "process-centric world", AccuProcess offers a completely free, permanent but limited functionality LITE edition of its industry-leading AccuProcess Modeler. This free edition will enable customers to easily create, map and document process models and share them with other users. This modeling software and online video tutorials are available at http://www.accuprocess.com/.
brought to you by enabling practitioners & organizations to achieve their goals using: