BPM/BPR Steps

BPM/BPR Steps

If you’ve decided that you can benefit from Business Process Management or Business Process Reengineering (BPM/BPR) you should follow these simple steps to help guide you in your project. 

Step 1: Partial or Full BPM/BPR System Development  

First you need to decide if you are going to do partial or full BPM/BPR system overhaul. What this means is: Are you going to start from scratch and replace your current system entirely or are you going to start with one particular section or department and fix that before you move on?  We always recommend, especially for first timers, that you start with partial BPM/BPR system development. This will allow you and your team to concentrate on a smaller piece of the puzzle and ensure that you do not skip any details. Also it will allow your team to get familiar with what you are doing and allow them to become part of it. It’s very easy to add to the system once you have it built, there is no need to rush through this. 

Step 2: BPM/BPR Mapping

BPR/BPM Mapping requires that you discover and document all of your business processes, and workflows. Find out who is doing what, where and when. Write it down in an organized fashion so you can get a good picture of your current situation. Remember, in order to improve your processes you have to know your current state and have a realistic picture of your situation. At Vela, during this phase, we would present you with illustrations of you business processes and workflows. 

Step 3: Collect Business Rules 

Go around your departments (the ones you are trying to improve) or your company if you are doing full scale BPM system development, and collect and document all Business Rules. The way to get to business rules is to keep asking questions, who, what, where, when. Business rules are often undocumented and happen often as a result of a meeting. An email goes out to notify employees of the new rule and the work continues. Lack of business rules documentation is apparent in companies that have to provide training to new employees beyond the first week. Because Business Rules are undocumented new employees are constantly asking how to do their job. 

Step 4: Customize Workflows and Create Your Utopia 

This is one place where you can have Utopia! Take a good look at your current system, learn it, study it, and find out where your redundancies are, which steps are unnecessary, what you can do to improve the picture and work more efficiently. Find out what you can do to minimize training for new employees, what you can do to automate processes. Think about how you can leverage technology to help you solve your problems, not reinforce them. During the first three steps you are concentrating on who, what, where, and when. During this step you need to concentrate on WHY. Ask why things are done in certain manner, it will often be because it’s an inherited process, not necessarily because it’s the best/most efficient way to do something. Once you’ve done all that, put together a plan and a perfect, utopian picture of what your processes should be. 

Step 5: Add Reports and Visibility Into Your Organization/Department 

The last step is to think about the reports and visibility into your organization/department that you would like to get from this system. If you have done your homework correctly this system will be home to an enormous amount of information that’s pertinent to your organization/department. Information is power and you want an easy way to access that information so you can plan your upcoming months and years acordingly.