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Have you as a “Stakeholder” ever taken the moment to step back and think about the performance of your Enterprise?

Review this case scenario and determine if you have observed the same within your Enterprise:

At the start of a meeting about the declining performance of the Customer Care Managers of enterprise XYZ, the attending top management team “knew” that the Customer Care Managers lacked skills and knowledge and required additional training.

By the meeting’s end, they were not so sure. During discussions several concerns unrelated to skills and knowledge surfaced about the processes of the Customer Care Managers. The presenting problem was that the Customer Care Managers could not delegate certain tasks, which caused time constraints in handling customer complaints.

As the case scenario indicates, it was thought the declining performance of the Customer Care Managers was contributed to lack of skills and knowledge, which can truly hinder performance in an Enterprise. However, as we can see the roles of the Customer Care Managers are limited by lack of delegation of certain tasks.

When one delegates within an Enterprise, he or she will direct elements such as – “tasks,” “events,” and/or “activities” to be performed by another entity: Technology or Human.

Business Process Management (BPM) enables an Enterprise to efficiently manage its processes to serve an end-result with input-perform work-output methodologies. So you can see how “Performance Architecture” is a key and integral part of a Business Process Management (BPM) projects. It provides the efficiencies to “tasks,” “events,” and/or “activities.” 

Performance Architecture

Performance Architecture in terms of BPM can be defined as the design principles required to optimize efficiencies in – tasks, events, and/or activities of the underlying Enterprise. 

Let’s use our case scenario as an example to illustrated through a Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) diagram the performance bottleneck of a Customer Care Manager.

Task = Determine if product is under warranty from a customer inquiry

As you can determine from the diagram, the Customer Care Manager must conduct the research to determine if the customer’s product is under warranty thus reducing the time to focus on “customer complaints” which SHOULD be a high priority task within the business process for “customer care.”

In another segment of the Enterprise, we have a Product Specialist that handles research and updates of product information as illustrated below.

As you can determine from the diagram, the Product Specialist manages the return method and warranty information to name a few. If you recall, it was discovered the Customer Care Managers were conducting their own research on product warranty information. Hence, this is one root cause of performance derogation to customer satisfaction. 

Now let us examine the two processes after a Performance Architecture intervention.

As you can now see, we have increase the performance efficiency of the Customer Care Manager by delegating certain customer inquiries to the Product Specialist. The Customer Care Manager’s primary task now is “handling complaints” which enhances the Enterprise’s perceived customer services as extraordinary, which in turn increases customer loyalty.  

In Summary

Performance Architecture is a subset of BPM in that it optimizes – tasks, events, and/or activities of the underlying Enterprise. The design methodology of Performance Architecture is to seek out inefficiencies in processes tasks, events, and/or activities. These inefficiencies can include but are not limited to the following:

• Duplicate or redundant tasks, events and/or activities
• Time constraints (i.e. time to complete  tasks, events and/or activities)
• Human stress (i.e. performing tasks, events and/or activities that can be delegated)
• Technology constrains (i.e. obsolete technology)

One should be very mindful not to over architect processes for performance for it may decrease or hamper scalability of the underlying processes which in itself will create performance issues.

Contact dotNet Framework Solutions for an evaluation of your enterprise!

Is your BPM Solution Audited?

So you have implemented a BPM solution and are receiving the desired ROI. So how do you ensure that the BPM continues to deliver optimal results? You do so by means of audits.Auditing of your BPM solution involves a detail look at the overall performance of the solution in the following areas:

·   The notation element

·   Business processes encapsulation

·   Business activity monitoring (BAM) metrics and reports

·   Enterprise planning and BPM integration

Audit of the Notation Element

Auditing of the Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) element involves reviewing the current version of the BPMN. In order to create “healthy” and effective processes modules that will the model the process correctly you must ensure that your BPM solution has the most current version of BPMN. The lasted version of BPMN is 1.0.Audit of the Processes Encapsulation

Auditing of processes encapsulation involves reviewing the physical business processes and how they are/were interpreted for input to the BPMN element of the solution. As the business grows, the processes that created that growth have changed. The changed processes may not be reflective in the BPM solutions which will deteriorate its performance. It is necessary to ensure that the physical processes and the BPM solution grow together.

Audit of the BAM Auditing of the Business Activity Monitoring element of the BPM solution involves review of each process element and the desired performance of that element. The preferred performance is then examined against the BAM metrics results and reports which is then evaluated for alignment.

Audit of the EAP and BPM Integration

Auditing of the enterprise planning and the integration gates to the BPM solution is a primary concern of the enterprise. The EAP is what provides growth, agility, and stability for the enterprise. When integrated into the BPM solution the plan implements action through processes. Since the EAP is a living plan the BPM solution MUST continuously remain consistent with the requirements of the plan. In Summary

The Essentials ProcessesMost enterprises have four core processes that encompass human, systems (hardware), and applications (software) operations. The four processes are:

·      Value Chain

·      Planning

·      Development

·      Resources

Capturing the Essentials

Most enterprise function on an inept set of these four core processes. Management has the basic understanding that they must find [value chain] vendors to provide raw materials (process inputs) that are used to produce products and/or services (process outputs). This ranges from paper, pencils, etc. to sheets of aluminum to create lets say cloths hangers.

Management must also conduct some form of [planning] to decide what will be produced (the vision). They will have to plan (the how) for the purchasing of supplies to the creation of product. They must generate development plans (the what) to produce the cloth hangers in our hypothetical case.

Now that management has conducted its planning, they are now prepared for the [development] of our hypothetical cloths hangers. The development of the cloth hangers will have inputs from the [value chain] and [planning] processes to provide and direct respectively how the cloth hangers will be produced.

Lastly, management requires internal and external humans, systems, and applications [resources] to provide our cloths hanger to the market.  

Placing in Actions

We have just written a draft of business process management (BPM) for the production of cloths hangers.  As you can see there are nouns (executions) and verbs (management) that makeup the functions taken to create our cloths hangers. We can take these nouns and verbs and model them into notations (BPMN) of functionality and procedures thus capturing the business process.

At many enterprises, a first useful step toward the goals of BPM is the formation of teams that includes top management, stakeholders and IT, as well as users or user representatives chosen by users. Also, be advised, it is unwise, if not impossible to capture every piece of information about every preformed activity/task (the lowest function of a process) by the enterprise. BPM should be incorporated and integrated with the use of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Customer Relations Management (CRM) to produce a closed loop methodology that then takes the enterprise on a journey and not a destination.

Contact dotNet Framework Solutions for your BPM consultation

BPMN (Business Process Management Notation) captures your processes and presents them in a graphical form.  BPMN is a standard defined by the Objects Management Group (OMG). BPMN provides many symbols to represent events, activities, tasks and others.Events:
 

Activity/Task:

Gateways:

Connecting:

A simple notated process: How would BPMN present the vision of the enterprise? Let’s view a hypothetical enterprise vision of making glowing cloths hangers. This vision would be the starting [Event] to a Business Planning Process. Within the Business Planning Process the glowing cloths hanger would move through multiple [Gateways] and [Activity/Task] notations.

Example: What color should the hanger have – a Gateway Method that flows to green or red?The receiving [Task] notation would then process the chosen color. The flow would continue in processing the vision of creating the glowing cloths hanger until the [End] [Event] occurs which would present a graphical representation similar as presented above.There are now tools available to presents a higher level of presentation then the representation presented here. For the executive team theses graphical presentation and statuses would provide great value to the course of the business by allowing for implementation of what-if scenarios that would be feed into a simulation processes thus returning visual results of the enterprise modification to the vision.

Contact dotNet Framework Solutions for your BPM consultation.