Business Process Management (BPM) cannot be done without business intelligence. BPM turns business intelligence from a bottom-up technical activity to a top-down management activity guided by chief executives.
Business Process Management is the science of business process improvement, which aims at continuous improvement of business processes through a recurrent cycle of definition, measurement and improvement actions, and covering a life cycle of five major activities:
- design: design activities cover both the identification and documentation of the existing processes as the basis design for future processes.
- modelling: modelling activities are based on the theoretical design and determine how the processes may operate under different circumstances. It involves what-if analysis, simulations and changes in important business drivers.
- execution: execution is about automating as much as possible the processes as designed and modeled. It covers IT-centric activities such as development or purchase of applications, which, combined with human intervention, allow the actual implementation of the processes.
- monitoring: monitoring of the processes is required so that information on their state and performance can be easily followed. Depending on the business needs, the information retrieved from process execution can be real-time focused, or statistics-focused.
- optimization: optimization is all about retrieving process performance information to identify potential issues and bottlenecks, to define enhancement actions and apply them.
Business Process Management closes the gap between IT and business, and business intelligence and performance management techniques provide the means to model, monitor and optimize processes in the context of BPM. More precisely, the following solutions are direct enablers for business process management professionals:
- dashboard and monitoring: focus on measuring the execution of business processes in terms of visual indicators and charts, depicting whether the performance falls within preset thresholds. Dashboards provide information about the execution of the business processes and are methodology independent.
- balanced scorecard: the balanced scorecard refers to a specific methodology developed by Kaplan and Norton to build balanced dashboards taking into account multiple monitoring and improvement perspectives.
- Enterprise Information Management: Enterprise Information Management practices, including the data warehouse, are the foundations required to each business intelligence and performance management initiative.
By providing the service and solutions to fully deliver the value of Business Process Management, Keyrus positions as a leader in the transformation of business intelligence towards performance management, BPM being one element.
