The primary challenge of BPM implementation-the flowchart of the Enterprise

At present, the benefits of many enterprises from process management can be well confirmed. For example, in a new Gartner study, 78% of successful BPM projects receive an internal rate of return over 15%, some enterprises have 100% or even 360% of the data. This study also found that more and more attention is paid to the participation of relevant personnel in business process management, not just the integration of systems and systems. In addition to financial returns, enterprises have always praised bpm for its ability to reduce errors, improve service levels, and increase business process transparency. Therefore, Gartner predicts that the popularity of BPM will continue to rise and will become the first choice for enterprises to increase their management investment. BPM can bring a competitive advantage to enterprises.

Business processes are everywhere in the Organization. Some processes have been defined in great detail and clarity. For example, the loan process is the core responsibility of a large number of financial departments. Therefore, details about how to handle the loan process are naturally well known. In contrast, most of the processes in an enterprise are still not well defined or documented. This is the result of people making immediate decisions to respond to the situation after years of business development. If it succeeds, these programs will be applied to similar situations and become recognized process standards after many years. If it fails, other methods will be tried until a useful process is found. As a result, the process has evolved over and over again, which is almost a replica of Darwin's evolution. Due to these situations, BPM implementation often faces many challenges-not only understanding the existing process, but also ensuring the flexibility of the process after automation using BPM technology, enables constant changes and adjustments to the process.

To succeed in BPM, business personnel and IT experts must form a team to fight together. Business personnel are the users of business processes. They understand the purpose and operation method of the process. Once needed, they will take action to adjust the existing process. The IT department provides technologies and infrastructure for automated enterprise process operations. They know how to manage data and the requirements for integration and system operation.

Enterprises need to explore a combination of IT infrastructure, business flow and business needs, and then convert them into business flow charts so as to automate the business flow of enterprises. This process requires the team to work hard and the process must be constantly adjusted to adapt to changes, which is the biggest challenge for the implementation of BPM projects. Deloitte (Delphi Group)'s latest research report states: "generally, the main focus is on the entire development stage, namely, demand analysis, process model development, and business rule formulation. On average, these activities (process and rule analysis combined with requirement definition) consume about 40% of the overall BPM project time. However, in fact, it is often found that this phase takes 50% to 60% of the project time or even more. "

To fully explore the process, IT staff and business staff representatives must work together to define a flow chart. The flowchart should reflect the flow of the Business Process and the business conditions or rules that lead to different paths. The flowchart along with the support document describes the process details in detail. Some process-defined work is similar to traditional application development, including:

. Data record requirements;
. Determine all tasks that may need to be completed during the process execution;
. Determine to use the existing system (to obtain information, transfer information or automate the entire process );
. Select how to collect information from the user through the workbook/user interface.

Some other details are exclusive to business processes (irrelevant to it ):

. Which conditions determine the steps required for the workflow;
. Who should complete each step of the process;
. How to handle exceptions that change the flow direction.

The detailed flowchart itself will also cause problems, which is determined by the nature of the flowchart. Although at the beginning, the process in the form of pictures can greatly promote our understanding of the process, but as the complexity of the process increases, the value of the process that it can enhance understanding is also decreasing. Even if you can draw the best flowchart, it is still very difficult for people who are not drawing experts to understand the drawing process (understanding the details behind the drawing. The flowchart in the form of pictures not only improves the clarity and comprehensibility of the process, but also increases the difficulty and confusion of understanding. In addition, we should also note that flowcharts and models can never be truly completed, because changes always happen all the time.

As the business process of an enterprise continues to change, the IT department of the enterprise will feel more and more pressure, because they have to do everything possible to understand, understand and implement the process requirements. However, we need to know that the key parts of these requirements often exist in the process owner's mind. They apply and adjust these requirements according to the needs of the business environment. In the IT department of an enterprise, it is necessary to define and normalize the rules and flows of the process, and there is no room for discussion. But from the business point of view, it is almost impossible to do this.

To solve these challenges, various methods and technologies emerge one after another. Some of them promote the coordination between the business department and IT department, and some reduce the code in the solution program, thus simplifying the changes, some have redefined the ideal team structure of the BPM project, and some have discussed these issues from a completely different perspective. In the next article of the author, we will discuss in more detail how to solve these difficulties in process analysis.