Business Process Management (BPM), Business Process Automation (BPA), Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), Business Process Reengineering (BPR), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma - it's all very confusing. There is a lot of jargon and a lot of promises being sold by BPM technology vendors about the benefits of BPM. The problem is, BPM technology alone will not solve any problems.
As an organisation, to gain the most from any application of BPM technology, you must understand your business processes. To gain an insight into your business processes, you should first document them. This is the task that many vendors and consultants undertake initially and the documentation of the processes provides a set of requirements that can be used as the basis for the applying the BPM technology. Once implemented, the organisation gains the incremental benefits of automating tasks that were previously performed manually.
The problem with the approach above is that there is a fundamental assumption that all the business processes should exist in the first place. Even if these processes are optimized prior to automation, whose responsibility is it to question whether these processes should exist? That is where Outside In Consulting can help. Our approach is to question whether or not business processes need to exist. We do this by applying the CEMMethod process diagnostics, first understanding and analysing your existing business processes and then determining whether they need to exist to deliver a successful customer outcome. If they do need to exist, we then optimize them by aligning them to the successful customer outcome.
The result of applying the Outside In diagnostics is an alignment to the successful customer outcomes, a removal of unnecessary complexity, a framework in which the processes can continue to improve and an action plan outlining the improvements. By adopting this approach, it is possible to eliminate between 40-70% of business processes, which significantly reduces the time and cost to apply BPM technology. Outside In Consulting is also solution agnostic, so we can help you make the decision about which BM solution is best suited to your needs, whether it be Metastorm BPM, Oracle BPM, BizAgi or any other of the BPM technologies in the market today.