Business Process Management in Enhancing Business Processes - Research Proposal Example

Title: Name Institution: Date: Business Process Management in enhancing business processes. Introduction Business process management (BPM) has remarkable advantages to organizations in managing their business. If BPM is well implemented firms using it will have economies of scale in form of cost savings, time as well achieving value through real return on investment (ROI). Purpose of conducting the Research. Many organizations have continued to question the capability of IS after many years of deep investment in Information Systems (IS) yet they are yet to realize the benefits. They are now not quick to invest more in IT and expect quick respond from IS functions. But the current competition among organizations requires improvement on customer services, manufacture of new products and cost reduction mechanisms. This is pushing business processes and their management to the core of organization’s priority list. Fortunately organizations need not look far. Organizations just need to approach process automation from a different view point. More and more CEOs are searching for diverse ways of improving business processes. They are trying at all costs to minimize heavy, risky and expensive investment in IS. As an alternative, they want to utilize the existing assets and focus their energy on automation of processes. This is what is currently referred to as business process management (BPM). BPM suite encompasses a variety of technologies. BPM has a software and management practice component used to manage, model and optimize processes. It is used in management of business processes that interact with human beings and machines within and across organizations. BPM guarantees transparency and visibility in business process which results in zero error, higher efficiency and output, and stronger legal compliance requirement. These ensure that an organization is able to adapt to dynamic marketplace, minimize operational costs, and customer satisfaction is enhanced through improved services. The Research Scope In the current globalization trend most organizations visions are tailored towards global competition, knowledge expansion, innovation and time to market and product life cycle. Unfortunately organization are not realizing this because managements of such organizations does not play a keen interest in aligning their IS strategy with that of its processes. This paper analyses various organizations in different sectors before they implement the business process management (BPM) and after the implantation to see the benefits of the automation system. A questionnaire is designed to find out if organizations are fully utilizing BPM and if the process of business process design involves all important employees in their particular area of jurisdiction. The majority of organizations have a vertical business structure. Unfortunately this structure does not fully support the proper implementation of business processes. Horizontal organization structure is proposed. The study will enable organizations to set and employ BPM solutions to sustain, permit, drive, and nurture the business. Research Question Do the current IS implementation support business processes in organizations? Every organization has set out its vision which needs to be accomplished. In order to achieve the vision, an organization must state its mission which it will follow. By extension the mission sets forth business processes that must be adhered to by it employees in order to achieve its vision. It is unfortunate that most organizations do not find time to ensure that their IS are compatible with their business processes. The processes of business which apply the approach of IS business in a strategic manner with the consideration of the best practices, processes, as well as methodologies that are specific to the industry with flexibility in delivery on a platform of scalable technology facilitates the achievements of the market as well as business goals in the enterprise (XSOL Software 2006). For long, organizations have not bothered to design their processes. Such processes have over time only evolved leading to organizations incorporating poor practices, a lot of wastage and to much redundancy. Applying IS automation to such processes have simply embedded the inefficiencies and made them more resistant to future modifications. In this research, a re-evaluation of current processes at various organizations is carried out to know if management finds time to design their business processes. Does every critical employee in the business process get involved in the design? Processes are used by people. Their participation is vital to the successful result. The research will equally examine if IS has contributed to the crucial role of mitigating against redundancy processes. With proper implementation of design and incorporation of IS in processes, organizations may find out that almost half of their current processes are no longer necessary. Research Method The research will employ both behavioral and non behavioral method. For instant in analysis the business process design it will be critical in analyzing management’s behavior if they ever involve their junior employees who use the system in its design. When changing from the vertical organizational to horizontal system it will be critical to note if management is willing to adapt this change. This equally is an aspect of behavior. On the other the technical proposal to implement the BPM are aspects of non behavioral aspects in the research study. Source of Data The research will involve case studies of three types of companies that have utilized the BPM. Emphasis is placed on quantization of the benefits before and after the company fully implements BPM in it operation. A questionnaire is issued to collect data on the organizational structure to support BPM implantation and the degree of employee involvement in the design of business processes. All data is secondary and is collected from websites of companies under study. Case Study 1: BPM Consultancy firm point of view A private independent agency called Intercai Mondiale, carried a research on random samplying of leading BPM vendor’s customer base and found that the following statistics: Variable Percehtage of satisfacction Increased Productivity 100% Reduction in operating costs 82% Improved quality of service 95% Faster process cycle times 82% BPM can be used to link the IT department and disparate systems. This will increase the value of current investments. Similarly BPM enables IT to future-proof network infrastructure. This means that additional changes to the system do not need reinvention or major configuration changes to the core business processes. The speedy growth as well as deployment of innovative applications and processes is composed of probable natural service oriented BPM infrastructure. This results in a system that is dynamic and that responds quickly to the changing demands of the organization. Case Study 2: BPM Customer’s point of view Allianz Ireland is a subsidiary company of the Allianz Group. Allianz Group is a major player and an European leader in insurance and financial services. Their problem was to be able provide trust worth multi-step e-commerce and interactive processes while at the same time reorganizing its external and internal processes. For this solution Allianz Ireland chose BPM to connect internal and external processes into a single integrated claims processing application. BPM was also used to integrate the management systems of its electronic documents. The case study showed that the BPM solution gave superior control and management of the system as well as enhanced access to information in its databases. The management system integration with electronic documents, workload re-balancing and automation of the company processes increased the company’s productivity. The study noted an approximately 80 percent rise in operational process based efficiency. Noted was also a decline in the number of claims processing from weeks to countable days. The reload of information reduced from half an hour to mere thirty seconds. In six months Allianz Ireland achieved a return on its investment (ROI). Case Study 3: Core implantation of BPM in a company As a leading telecommunication provider company in Netherlands, KPN has approximately eight million fixed network customers and approximately fourteen million mobile subscribers. Following an increase for broadband order demand KPN had to reanalyze its customer manual requests and broadband order processing which was extremely tedious, time consuming and prone to errors. The company needed an automated processing mechanism in order to handle its expected 600,000 new orders. The solution to this depended on the deployment of BPM software. BPM was implemented to automate its entire broadband/DSL subscriber requests and order processing. BPM solution was integrated as a new system together with KPN’s legacy applications. After BPM deployment KPN learned a lot more about its business processes and how they interact and operates. It was much easier to now apply changes in company’s core business processes. Before implantation of BPM, it took KPN approximately five weeks to implement any changes. Currently the company does it in two weeks. The BPM deployment minimized KPN’s average time for order processing by about 90 percent. KPN managed to get cost savings of between €150,000 and €200,000 a month just after BPM deployment. The company estimates that BPM solution achieved a 50 percent improvement on productivity, 95% error minimization and 80 percent automation of its orders. Questionnaire analysis The questionnaire in Appendix A was used to find how organizations are using their BPM fully. The analysis is outlined below. Under utilization of BPM Research shows that organizations that have employed BPM are utilizing about 40 to 60% of its capabilities. Either they lack technical expertise or just fear to fully take advantage of the capabilities of BPM is the question to ponder upon. From a technical point of view BPM is a convergence of several technologies. Its core roots are in process management capabilities of workflow tools. It too has capabilities to draw from application integration, process modeling, rules management, process analytics and interactive portals. Some organizations have not fully utilized the capabilities of technology convergence yet they have implemented BPM. It is unfortunate to note that some of the processes being done manually are prone to risk, are time consuming and can save on costs if done via BPM. BPM is not made of the above suite alone, but it is used to merge all this technical elements into a unified platform. The central platform manages process lifecycle starting from process definition through process deployment, process execution, process measurement, process change and finally process re-deployment. BPM is an IT based process-centric application that contains process management application that is not directly linked to its central application, their connection as well as data. BPM has an independent process layer that contains all the actions required to carry out a given business process. The independent layer controls the flow of these actions whether they engage diverse applications, different people, or both. This autonomous process layer can be used to combine both current and future improvement design investments in content repositories, applications and integration tools. Organizational Business Structure and level of employee involvement From the survey, 80 percent of organizations that underutilize their BPM have a vertical organizational structure. In this structure managers are the only ones entitled to design business processes. After they have designed such process they pass it to the employees for implementation in a top - down hierarchy. The rationale why the top down is not good for BPM is because it is inclined to behavioral aspects as opposed to the process aspects (Pieterse 2008). In Pyramid, Top- down or vertical organizational structure. employees will have to frequently go up to their managers to get answer and decisions. This wastes time and other resources. In a horizontal organization structure employees are responsible for their own decisions. Instead of being separated from real work, decision making becomes part of their work. A horizontal structure, as opposed to a pyramid one gives employees more powers as well as making it easy to communicate the vision of the organization. Horizontal organization will need few managers – reducing costs inform of the high salaries paid to managers. It is also less bureaucratic and will give more cross-functional workers. Further a flattened organization make it possible for cross-functional core processes, installs process owners, make teams, not individuals, the cornerstone of organizational design and performance, integrates well with customers and suppliers and decreases hierarchy by eliminating non-value-added work and by giving team members the authority to make decisions (IIFOR 2001). The remaining 20% who have a horizontal organizational structure yet they underutilize the capabilities of BPM is because they do not take time to design their business processes. Business processes require carefully design, and to some extend organizations are required to get the help of consultants to reduce on issue like redundancy in processes. Sample size for the research The case studies involved three companies; a consultancy based firm, a customer oriented company and a telecommunication core company. The sample size is wide enough to get a general overview of the BPM implementation impact in the organizations. The questionnaire is meant for five companies. The five equally provide sufficient sample space to the analysis of organizational structure and employee involvement in the design of business processes. Sources of Data. Data used was internet based from the companies involved. A questionnaire found in Appendix A was also used to collect data. Statistical Analysis Tool: Time Series. The most useful statistical analysis tool used in this survey is the simplified form of time series analysis. Time Series analysis tool has few assumptions on the data under analysis is flexible and is particularly suitable for case studies. In this particular case Time Series is used to find out if there is a particular trend before and after implementation of BPM. The trend was evaluated by features: slope and magnitude. In slope emphasis was placed on finding out how various variables including cost, time to market and process life-cycle compare before and after the implementation of the BPM. Emphasis is placed on quantization of the results and giving a feedback in form of percentages. The percentage will indicate if the gradient of the slope is upward, downwards or remain flat. The magnitude is used to emphasis rate of the slope change, that is, if there is a change in the slope how rapid is it. The C statics can be used to evaluate the magnitude of change. Ethical issues considered in the research It was important that company secrets are preserved and detailed financial information and operations were not sort in the analysis. Works cited: IIFOR . “Horizontal Organization - A brief survey”. International Institute for Organization Research. 17 Feb. 2001, 15 Nov. 2009, Pieterse T. “Enterprise architecture: Top-down or botton-up?” White Paper Library: New Research, Toolbox for IT, 14 Sept. 2008, 15 Nov. 2009, XSOL Software. “Reaping Benefits from Business Process Mapping”. Whitepaper, Parnell, Auckland, 14 May 2006, 16 Nov. 2009 APPENDIX A: Questionnaire 1. Have you implemented BMP in your organization? 2. If yes to 1 above, which tasks are being performed by BMP in your organization? 3. What is the organizational structure of your organization? 4. Does your organization design its business process or they are merely implemented without being designed? 5. Which employees in your organization are responsible for the design of business processes in your organization? What are their positions? Read More