DEV Community

Cover image for BPM - why is it a great discipline for an organization?
sabrinasuarezarrieta
sabrinasuarezarrieta

Posted on

BPM - why is it a great discipline for an organization?

At first, when I started working in the company where I work, I really did not understand what was BPM and now I want to share my experience with it of 2 years.

Business Process Management (BPM) is a discipline involving any combination of modelling, automation, execution, control, measurement and optimization of business activity flows, in support of enterprise goals, spanning systems, employees, customers and partners within and beyond the enterprise boundaries.”

As the definition says BPM is a discipline and nothing has to do with the tool that you use to support it. Almost all companies model and execute processes to ensure the quality of their products or services and the resources used to achieve the objectives. A person doing BPM must consider a process at the scope of interrelated business activities which holistically cooperate to fulfil a business objective.

The principal benefits of using a BPM tool in my opinion are 2:

  • The universality in the notation of the definition of processes, any person that understands the BPM notation is capable of seeing your process and without much studying can comprehend it.
  • All the information is digitized which means that is easier to manage and create statistics turning information into knowledge that can support decision-making

And I have to say that there are a variety of BPM tools that your company could use like:

  • Progress Savvion BPM - Intalio
  • IBM Business Process Manager 
  • Oracle Business Process Management Suite.  But all of them have very similar or even the same notation so.

I wanted to give you a little example of how simple can be a process but how meaningful could be the correct management of the information obtained. In this case, we are going to model the process of performance evaluation.

Alt Text

In this simple example, we can see how first the leader decides to begin the employee's performance evaluation, and the first step is the self-assessment by the employee and next, the evaluation by the leader, this simple process can be overwhelming when the number of employees depending on one leader is more than 20 but is even worse try to analyze that information.

With the BPM tool we have all the information in the databases and is easier to have statistics like:

  • which was the one that got the best score
  • what was the area when people exceed expectation
  • Or at the contrary, what was the worst-rated question and how the leader is going to help people to go better?

With this simple example, I just wanted to show that the benefits of BPM implementations aren't just for big companies, a little process can see the added value and can help the company to improve.

I hope that after reading this you could be less intimidate when you hear the term BPM, thank you so much for reading and have an excellent day!!

Top comments (0)