Business Process Management - Case Study Example

In today’s era, many organization use BPM for identifying, monitoring and optimizing their business processes. Organization that wants to introduce BPM in their business, face challenge of high investment costs on software, hardware, and maintenance. Therefore, the scalability of BPM is another issue that organizations have to deal with in order to keep pace with rapidly changing business demands. By integrating cloud based and traditional BPM, enterprise can reap the benefits of both realms. This paper introduces business process management, its life cycle, gives overview of cloud computing and its characteristics that BMP might benefit from, investigates the need of combining BMP and cloud computing along with distribution solution to overcome cloud based BPM challenges (Duipmans, 2012) states that the BPM lifecycle is shown in Figure 2.1 and consists of the following phases: Designing: This process refers to the way by which an enterprise understands, defines and documents the business process activities that enable it to function economically, effectively. The purpose of process design is to make sure that business processes are optimized, meet customer requirement and assist organizational development. Implementing: In the implementation phase, the designed process is implemented in real time environment using an executable process language. The purpose of this phase is to capture more details that are required to execute the process. Executioning : In this phase, business processes are automated by using BPM application, individual process instances are derived from the process specification and executed. BPM applications are either purchased or develop in house to suit a company needs. Monitoring : During this stage, data from multiple process instances is collected to discover temporal trends and design flaws. An example of monitoring the process is being able to determine the stage of customer order (e.g. order arrived, waiting to delivery, invoice order) Optimising : refer to improving processes and performance by minimise inefficiencies Which identified during monitoring phase. Cloud model: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) categorize cloud computing based on service models. The model includes (Duipmans & Pires, 2012): Infrastructure as a Service model: This is the lowest layer in the cloud computing stack. As shown in Figure 3.1, in IaaS service model, Cloud users directly IT infrastructure, CPU power, storage, networks, and other basic computing resources) provided in this model. Cloud vendor provide user with a virtualisation platform rather than offering these service directly to the costumer. The consumer only need to install and configure a virtual machine, which runs on the hardware of the cloud vendor .This greatly eliminate a lot of upfront capital expenditure in computing hardware such as servers, networking devices and processing power. It also allows organisations to focus on their core competencies without worrying much about the provisioning and management of IT infrastructure. A prime example of IaaS is Amazons EC2. Platform as a Service: PaaS is the service model above IaaS on the cloud computing stack. this service model provides a development environment on which customers can create and deploy their own applications without worrying about how many processor or how much memory their application will be using. PaaS cloud service model works like IaaS, the only deference that SaaS only offers a completed cloud applications where PaaS provides a development environment for either completed or in- progress cloud applications. An example for PaaS is Google’s App Engine which is platform for Java-based (web) applications. Software as a Service : SaaS is a cloud service model in which a complete application is offered to the customer in pay per use manner. It also known as On-demand software because it is purely dynamic in its requests. In this service model, the customer does not need capital investment in servers or software licenses. From provider side, the costs are lowered, since only signal instance of software runs on the cloud and multiple customers are served. Examples of SaaS include: Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, Zoho, etc. Business case transformation Traditionally, most BPM applications are limited to large multinational organizations. The deployment of BPM in the cloud presents an opportunity to enable small and medium enterprise market (SME) to reach for BPM applications as they only pay for what they need due to the elasticity and scalability of cloud computing. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) The integration of BPM and cloud computing enable enterprise with specific domain expertise such as legal services, healthcare, or financial services can benefit of the BPO market by selling their intellectual property (IP) through the development of BPaaS applications.  Rapid Prototyping and Try Before You Buy Cloud based BPM gives clients the opportunity to trying and testing of BPM applications in the cloud. As a consequence, the deployment of business process solutions is de-risked especially for enterprise that still in the development phase of their business process solutions. Extending Business Process to Mobile Devices Cloud computing is leading the evolution of mobile BPM through customer applications for smartphone. It extends the mobile ability BPM application through access to the cloud storage and processing. That allow employee to stay online and informed to make business decision regardless of where they are. Case study: Company overview PsHEALTH is a development firm which established in 2008 . PsHEALTH offers SaaS-based customised patient management for customers in the healthcare field. It has 15 employees and two offices in the United Kingdom. PsHEALTH is serving a stringently regulated market in the United Kingdom. Its clients include large healthcare agencies, private health care providers and home-care providers (Fleming, 2012).. Solution Igolv Urnes, cofounder and principal of PsHEALTH setup the company emphasizing on not to spend their time and effort on coding and underlying technology. Instead, they need to transfer their focus to understanding the clients’ processes. For that purpose, he put together a team consisting of healthcare experts and technology professionals, who participated in building up a business model that meet their requirements and objectives, as detailed below (Fleming, 2012). 1.1Challenges PsHEALTH needed a platform that enables them to build up a process-based, safe and fast customized software solution. In order to do this they realized that the reusability is an important aspect that needs to be included in the solution to avoid re-inventing the wheel for each new client. As psHEALTH proposes solutions to their clients, they start up by prototyping and implementing it in series of iterations, with a full focus on the client’s process. Their goal is to provide a full end product within two months (Fleming, 2012). 2. Selection By evaluating the situation, PsHEALTH reached a crossroad of three technology options. Coding the application was eliminated option due to the lack of experience in coding and programming. Another possible option of modifying existing- applications was also eliminated due to the fact that there is no application that does “healthcare case management” because the cases are so diverse. This can be perfectly depicted as Urnes states, “People buying an off-the-shelf solution and using 20% of the functionality, and its really not the right tool.” says Urnes. This leads to the option that matches their needs perfectly, that is using Business Process Management (Fleming, 2012). Key requirement As PsHEALTH needed to focus on the process rather than the underlying technology, their main requirement is to have a user friendly, thin delivery and codeless platform, In addition, and to achieve flexibility, they will provide the developed solution through the cloud, so they will need to work with SaaS architecture as well. Lastly, the organizations need a robust security standards in order to comply with a heavy regulated market regulations in the UK that are aligned with the statutory laws of the British government. 4.2.4. Product selection and Implementation PsHEALTH shorten their list of option down to couple of vendors; Appian, Lombardi and Pegasystems. However, not all of them met their functional requirement. The selection was on Appian for their offer flexibility and remarkable valuable customer list. With Appian’s services, a team of 10 PsHEALTH’s members was able to develop their first prototype, present and sell it to a major UK health insurer, in about three months. 4.3. Results PsHEALTH is basically a reseller of a customized software solutions targeting healthcare market. Providing their services on a user friendly and secure PaaS and SaaS service provider allowed them to lunch quickly without extensive professional services needed. The costs, the IT experience, delivery time and security requirements were all satisfied with the support of the BPMS’s tools and capability. As a result, it enables PsHEALTH to be client focused. References Duipmans, E. F., Pires, L. F., &da Silva Santos, L. O. B. (2012) Towards a BPM cloud architecture with data and activity distribution. In Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference Workshops (EDOCW), 2012 IEEE 16th International (pp. 165- 171). IEEE. Duipmans, E. F. (2012). Business process management in the cloud with data and activity distribution.University of Twente. Whibley, P. (2012). BPM in the Cloud-Transforming the Business Case for Process Improvement Fleming M. (2012). Silverstein J. PsHEALTH Selects Appian for Quick Health Apps Development Read More