Business process management empowers the business users to modify the process to their needs rather than be dependent on their IT colleagues to make changes.

A lean organization continuously improves existing business practices by focusing on balanced capacity, flexibility, agility and continuous process or technology improvement. Additionally, lean philosophy addresses performance improvement by reducing waste. This could be waste resulting from overproduction, idle time in the process, unnecessary transport of material, over-processing of material due to poor tool or product design, inventory of more than the absolute minimum, unnecessary movement by employees during work or production of defective parts.

The tools and techniques that have been popular in achieving lean objectives include jidoka, kanban, kaizen, poka yoke, Six Sigma and JIT, among others. These have been effective in continuously improving the process, preventing defects, trapping defects as near to the source as possible and ensuring that the defects do not travel downstream. This calls for a shift from the traditional measures of performance like “efficiency” and “utilization” to “agility,” “reduced cycle time” and “inventory turnaround times,” and a move toward business process management (BPM).

BPM enables modeling, designing and publishing of processes. It also helps in managing execution and implementation of the processes. The standard features that a BPM tool comprises consist of a business process modeler, a graphical workflow designer and a process engine. BPM tools also have the ability to link document management, rules engines and enterprise application integration capabilities. BPM takes a process-centric view and seeks to look at “value chain processes” as opposed to a traditional transaction-oriented approach.

Additionally, BPM empowers the business users to modify the process to their needs rather than be dependent on their IT colleagues to make the changes. It gives the business much-needed flexibility and agility by incorporating real-time changes to the process since the BPM application is not “hard wired,” as is the case with most traditional applications.

Fusing BPM into Lean Practices
Most enterprises today have a host of applications that address specific requirements of the organization. While these applications talk to each other to ensure data transfer and integration, most are still managed in functional silos.

Additionally, as business processes are usually locally optimized, enterprises end up with a sub-optimal end-to-end business process. Optimization at the sub-process level does not necessarily optimize the end-to-end process. This builds up inefficiencies in the process and leaves scope for streamlining the end-to-end business process.

While the lean techniques provide for the “know how” of optimizing business processes, BPM provides the “infrastructure” to implement these efficiencies and sustain them on an ongoing basis. BPM tools provide modeling, simulation and orchestration capabilities that can be used to optimize the business process across the value-chain.

One of the central tenets of a lean philosophy calls for documenting the existing way of doing things so process adherence and conformance to the defined process is enforced. As BPM helps organizations map their existing process on the workflow designer, organizations can execute the defined process and maintain a repository that contains variations of the processes.

Lean initiatives talk about continuous improvement in the process. This means that processes must be changed and improved on a continuous basis and these changes must be communicated to all the value-chain partners. However, one of the most challenging aspects for an enterprise is to ensure conformance and adherence to the defined process. This is especially significant when processes undergo changes on a continuous basis. Depending on the needs, conformance to set procedures and quality can be enforced in BPM by building necessary checks and balances and control at various steps in the process.

Most BPM systems capture data at each step of a process level. This means that historical data can be analyzed to identify the inherent bottlenecks and flaws in the existing process and figure out a better way of doing things. Otherwise, this would be a very tedious exercise. Identifying problems at a process level also helps in addressing the issue of data availability, since some processes require a human interface.

This approach helps to analyze and reduce the least-value-adding activities in the process and ensure the cost of the process at each step is in proportion to the value being added by that step in the overall scheme of things.

Another area where BPM plays an important role is in moving and synchronizing data across disparate systems throughout an organization. For example, there is a need for specific processes that transform data for usage in different applications. Most BPM systems support and enable these transformations.

BPM Benefits
The visibility that a BPM system provides across the value chain can be used as a proactive input for strategic decision-making. BPM tools provide insights into the efficiency parameters of the process and hence directly enable efficiency in scheduling and allocating resources, compliance tracking and reporting and MIS and planning activities. Organizations can improve quality by weeding out inefficient processes. This can be done by identifying the bottlenecks for improving quality and eliminating the probability of failures.

Most organizations that have already made huge investments in ERP systems are finding it difficult to adapt to lean environments. This is because ERP has been focused around transactions and not processes. Typical business processes are a complex web of transactions requiring human and machine interface, and making changes to the system is time-consuming and difficult because ERPs are hardwired. Hence, in the current competitive scenario, where the key to survival is striving for increasing efficiencies through better processes, BPM tools can be extremely effective.

BPM is a practice that is a function of people, behaviors and actions. Although technology automates many tasks, it cannot perform business process thinking, conduct process reengineering, lead change initiatives or propagate top-to-bottom business process behaviors in the organization.

Thus, it is important for enterprises to remember that BPM is not a panacea for all the pains prevalent in the organization. It is just an enabler; what benefits enterprises derive from it is a function of how effectively enterprises are able to execute “process vision” using BPM. Hence, “execution” is the key for achieving these benefits.

While there are solutions available in the market to help organizations adopt lean practices, no automated tool can enable lean operations until the underlying business processes are optimized. By using BPM for driving process efficiencies in lean, organizations can eliminate non-value-added activities. As BPM tools provide the capability of automating, monitoring and changing processes, they can help organizations cut down inefficiencies across the entire organization and fulfill the objectives of lean practices.

Satishchandra Nayak is head of the Center of Excellence for Business Process Management and IT Governance for Patni Computer Systems. He may be reached at 91-22-2829-1454, x5762.