VII Consulting – Process management: Making processes work in the real world

Process Management is the understanding, visibility and control of business processes.

As business processes represent discrete series of activities or task steps that can span people, applications, business events and organizations, VIIC logically relates Process Management or Business Process Management (BPM) with other process improvement disciplines and assists organizations with the understanding, selection, planning and implementation of such disciplines.

At the most basic level, business process management can be defined as a method for modeling, automating, managing, and optimizing repeatable business processes according to formalized rules and procedures.

Business Analysis (BA) focuses on the enterprise at a high level, and reviews processes in context of the organizational objectives and strategy

Business Process Analysis (BPA) focuses on the individual processes and their interaction with people, systems and technology.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is primarily concerned with the future state of an organization and the short comings of its current processes.

Business Process Management (BPM) projects assume that there are well defined processes that are aligned to the organizational objectives, hence the focus of these projects are to ensure that processes are measurable and to develop the metrics standard.

Business Process Improvement (BPI) initiatives are mainly concerned with support processes and generally focus on specific aspects of processes. These initiatives (not to confuse with BPR) look at aspects of processes such as quality standards, and compliance to industry requirements.

Business Process Automation (BPAU) identifies repeatable value add processes that can be assisted by the appropriate technology, in order to speed up cycle time and improve process accuracy.

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) projects rely heavily on technology in order to monitor and analyze company performance, from the lowest process level up to the overall company performance.

Although the Process Management disciplines can be applied to an organization as separate initiatives, this is rarely the case. The reason for this is that management may have a specific objective in mind, but may find that some of the processes are lacking from a visibility, control, compliance, etc perspective, and that these aspects need to be resolved before the stated project objective can be realized.

VIIC has extensive experience in Process Management; however we do not claim to cover the full spectrum of disciplines in this field. What however differentiates VIIC in this field is our focus on the change management aspects of all initiatives in this field, as experience has shown that a well built solution can still fail if it does not deliver the desired results on time and in a manner that it is adopted by the organization.

VIIC can offer the following services in the related fields:

Business Analysis (BA)

• Enterprise review in order to establish the alignment of the objectives, processes and structure in relation to delivering to the customers needs
• Enterprise architecture reviews in order to assess if the enterprise in its current form will deliver to the enterprise objectives processes and structure in relation to delivering to the customers needs
• Assessment of enterprise readiness for various process and change initiatives processes and structure in relation to delivering to the customers needs
• Mapping of the current enterprise strategy to objectives and core processes . processes and structure in relation to delivering to the customers needs

Business Process Analysis (BPA)

• Current business process cataloging in order to support process and document configuration management
• Mapping of current processes where processes are not visible or need to be mapped to a specific notation standard in order to support future process initiatives.
• Identification of potential improvement areas for specific processes
• Exposing current process risks that need to be mitigated
• Identification of current process controls and control weaknesses

Business Process Optimisation (BPO)

• Redesign and optimization of current processes, people and technology interaction in order to address the organizations objectives and customer needs in the most optimal way.
• Alignment of and incorporation of industry business process best practice (process excellence).
• Future business process cataloging in order to support process and document configuration management
• Mapping of future (To-Be) processes in order to make processes visible and usable in future process initiatives.
• Identifying repressive forces in post-process implementation for sustainable value (the human factor in process optimization)

Business Process Management (BPM)

• Defining of the BPM stakeholder’s information requirements, in order to make the management of processes efficient
• Establishing of a business process configuration management frame work in order to manage the process documentation for version control and knowledge management purposes
• Definition of business metrics and targets based on current performance, customer expectations, enterprise objectives and benchmarking
• Assistance with the selection and implementation of BPM tools, based on the specific requirements of the organization

Business Process Improvement (BPI)

VIIC’s method to BPI combines “doing thing right” with “doing the rights things”. This is based on incorporating business improvement methodologies in our BPI initiatives. It is important to consider that end goal of a BPI initiative is to affect a change in the overall performance of an organization rather than a specific functional area. VIIC’s implementation methodology for BPI does however allow for an incremental approach.