In the Batman movie 'The Dark Knight' the Joker famously said "If you are good at something never do it for free", This is the essence of business – providing goods and/or services to someone who pays for them.
So whether it is a big manufacturing or Services Corporation a small coffee shop around the corner or a plumber who fixes your bathroom everyone is doing business.
As it is said achieving the top position is a difficult task but staying at the top is even more difficult, similarly The inception and setup of a business is indeed a difficult task but the real challenge for an organization is to stay competitive in the business marketplace.
To achieve this objective the organization must be able to adapt according to the surroundings because the product/service which is in high demand right now would be of no use tomorrow.
There are many examples of corporations failing to adapt to market changes, consumer preferences, etc., and going downhill rapidly than anyone could imagine.
Thus to stay competitive in the marketplace the organization must be willing to adapt to its surroundings and embrace changes proactively so that it can grow and prosper.
The biggest change that happened in recent times is the advancement of science and technology leading to the emergence of new equipment and gadgets with computers, mobile and the internet at the forefront causing a huge impact on business methodology.
Now you can order your food online or through mobile, transfer money to someone living thousands of kilometers away with just a click of a mouse, get a lot of information online before buying a product; receive information about an incident happening in some other continent within seconds.
These things have become very trivial to us but turning the clock just a decade back would be enough to make us realize that back then we wouldn't have even visualized the things that have become part of our life now and I feel very proud that India has been a big contributor towards this, especially the IT revolution.
Although it is a big irony that the average Indian today builds and supports modern software solutions to all sorts of industries – manufacturing, banking, medical even government services like obtaining a driving license or passport the same Indian has to face a lot of troubles in obtaining his passport or driving license due to the governance system which is at least 20 years older than the par, let's leave this discussion for some other time.
The penetration of IT in business functions has been a spiral evolving process starting from the usage of computers for simple administration functions to ad-hoc automated processes, data management, etc. to currently used sophisticated software solutions like customer support solutions, operations support solutions, etc.
IT started as a backend support function but in a short span has become an important ingredient of business functions, The dependency of business on IT has grown so much that now IT is driving the business instead of supporting it and it has become possible due to technological advancements in the fields of Data Mining, Business Analytics, Social networking and others with the onset of new technologies like Big Data, Cloud Computing, Mobile technologies etc.
One such new and enormously valuable innovation is Business Process Management (BPM).
BPM is the systematic technological approach to managing business processes (can be defined as an activity or set of activities that will accomplish a specific organizational goal) to achieve the objective of continuous improvement in business effectiveness, efficiency and operational agility.
BPM encompasses Total Quality Management or Continuous Improvement Process methodologies by providing a viable genuine approach to the management of business processes in times of change.
The goal of BPM is to reduce human error and miscommunication, focus stakeholders on the requirements of their roles, and make organization workflow more effective, more efficient, and more capable of adapting to an ever-changing environment.
There are a lot of BPM tools available in the market from different corporations, but each one will surely have these capabilities –
vision – strategize functions and processes
define – baseline the process or the process improvement
model – simulate the change to the process
analyze – compare the various simulations to determine an optimal improvement
improve – select and implement the improvement
Control – deploy this implementation and, by use of user-defined dashboards, monitor the improvement in real-time and feed the performance information back into the simulation model in preparation for the next improvement iteration
re-engineer – revamp the processes from scratch for better results
We can conclude that BPM brings with it the benefit of being able to simulate changes to business processes based on real-life data so that business organizations can adapt to environmental changes quickly.
This article is written by Mr. Udyan Raj Sharma, who is working at Oracle India Pvt. Ltd in Noida, India.
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