Business Process Management (BPM)

The PBD starts with examining the end-product data elements and associated business rules. The BA team then uses this information to redesign a process that produces the end-product. Special note about the team. The lead BA should remind the team members that this is a redesign effort. This is a real challenge especially for the team members who are knowledgeable with the existing process. It may be best to recruit team members with a “fresh pair of eyes.” Note that there is no doubt that the BA team will consider automation in the redesign. In this effort, the BA team should keep in mind a quote attributed to Bill Gates [3] on BPM.

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. [7]

In my experience, all benefits come from redesigning or improving existing processes, not by applying automation through software. Software only facilitates the process improvement.

The purpose of this article is to show the expansion of an existing Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) model due to an increased interest in a partner’s processes.  In a previous article, I developed a BPMN model on a home medical process associated with peritoneal dialysis. In that article, I modeled a process, Ship Dialysis Equipment, as a black box pool;

Many BAs (especially the most experienced ones) should be familiar with processes...  Let us try to reveal, how BA skills are applicable to BPM and which steps a BA should take to transfer their knowledge to a state sufficient to fully enter the BPM sphere.

The path to choosing a third party business process management (BPM) system is riddled with potential pitfalls. The decision can make or break a business, so it’s worth the time and effort to get it right.

While the benefits of an effective Business Process Management solution are clear, a truly successful, on-time implementation can prove elusive. As a Business Analyst, you may be held responsible for project timelines. So when the schedule starts slipping, your credibility can slip away with it. This article discusses how agile technology and processes can slash implementation times from months or years to a few weeks or evendays, reducing time to value and ensuring successful, on-time, on-budget implementations.

The purpose of this article is to show an example of using Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) to document the home medical process of peritoneal dialysis plus using 5S principles in the treatment workspace.

Business process management (BPM) is evolving rapidly in the face of ongoing advancements in technology, an increasingly multigenerational workforce, and an evolving and complex regulatory landscape. Underpinning every BPM initiative is a focus on creating and sharing professional process diagrams.

There are capabilities necessary to implement Smart Systems, where business people manage business logic in a business-like and agile fashion, with highest integrity, and deployable to any and many targets. These are the requirements satisfied by a BDMS, not by a BRMS 

At some time or another, most companies will likely experience a point in their development when business process management (BPM) will need to be adjusted in order to support growth, mitigate a challenge or respond to market trends. Exploring how multinational corporations such as Apple and Hewlett-Packard have handled such challenges can offer insight for managers looking to apply best practices to the unique situations facing their own organizations.

There is an exciting paradigm shift happening within the information systems (IS) field. This means a new breed of information systems is emerging as are new approaches for developing them. The good news is that business analysts may be more critical to the new paradigm than to past ones. 

Business process models are intuitive. That’s why people like them. They provide management blueprints for coordinating repetitive work. But are they sufficient for creating an optimal business solution for a business challenge? No. This discussion brings into focus some of their blind spots and what you can do to address them successfully.
 

If you’re looking to manage business activities on a business-process basis, stability is key. But business rules aren’t stable. In fact, many change quite rapidly. What should you do? Separate the business rules from the business process model, so the business process model can do its job.

There are considerable benefits from extending business process management capabilities outside the boundaries of the company, and clearly measurable value is much easier to quantify when stakeholders are outside the traditional walls of the business.

A swimlane diagram is a type of process flow diagram (also sometimes called a cross-functional diagram) that features divisions or "lanes." Each lane is assigned an actor (which may be an individual, department, division, group, machine, entity, and so on), or even a phase or stage in a process, that is responsible for the activity or work described in the lane.

More and more organizations are taking advantage of business process management (BPM) solutions. And yet, it is often the case that, after an initial success or two, the growth of BPM within a company stalls.