A Business Process Management Framework starts with a philosophy on how you want to manage your
organization. Some organization: Some of more common business management philosophies are
- Manage by Department or Cost Center (e.g. accounting, human resources, purchasing)
- Quality as overriding philosophy as used by
Malcolm Baldrige Award winners
- Managing by Cross Functional Business Processes both within and
extending beyond your organization
Lets discuss each of these approaches
- Manage by Department or Cost Center (This
is the traditional way of managing organizations. Although managing by
department seems logical, it does not easily take into consideration how
other parties of the organization can negatively impact a specific cost
center or department. For example, a poorly worded marketing piece may
generate more calls to customer service driving up customer service costs.
Although the higher cost occurred in customer service, the root cause of
this higher cost was from marketing. Eventually organizations can figure
this out, but it is often not easy. It often results in laying the blame on
the wrong department and not solving the problem quickly.
- Quality as overriding philosophy as used by
Malcolm Baldrige Award
winners. This approach works for some organizations. Very few
would deny that increasing the quality of every process is a worthwhile
goal. Malcolm Baldrige and other winners of quality awards have been very
successful in managing by this approach. However, this approach
- takes a great deal of discipline
- often does not address cost issues
very well
- may look at processes only within a department rather than across
departments
However, overall this is a great way to manage an organization.
- Cross Functional Business Process Management both within and extending beyond your organization. Many different
techniques suggest managing by processes:
- Tom Peters says its a 'XFn' [cross functional]
world
- Core Competencies techniques identifies
your core processes for your success and then has you consider outsourcing
all non-core processes while focusing your greatest effectiveness and
efficiency efforts on your core processes
- Quality techniques like
Total Quality Management or six sigma focus on processes
- Lean Management talks about value
streams which are really processes
- Reengineering is starting over to
redesign your cross functional processes
- Bossidy in his book on Execution discusses
3 major processes: Human
Resources, Operations, Planning
-
Activity Based Management
talks about
defining processes both within and outside your department as well as
outside your organization with customer and vendors
-
Business Process Management
talks about
defining processes both within and outside your department as well as
outside your organization with customer and vendors
- Michael Porter the famous Harvard Professor on strategic planning
talks about maintaining your competitive advantage by connecting a series of
interrelated processes
-
Balanced Scorecard relates your
key performance indicators
and b>
process improvement to your 4 Balanced
Scorecard perspectives and to your b>
strategic planning
So there is support from many different business management techniques that managing by cross
functional processes is the best way to effectively manage an organization.
For more information on the 'Why manage by processes?", click following link which will
take you to our videos page showing a series of
Business Process Management videos on YouTube. .
Now that we have the "Why business process management?". we need to understand
the basic Business Process Management framework.
- Define 8-12 high level MACRO business processes
- Sales and Marketing
,
- Provide Financial Information
- Manufacture Product or Create Service
- Provide Trained Employees
- .
- .
- .
- .
- Define Sub-Processes that support Macro Processes
(e.g. sales and marketing)
- Research Market
- Create Marketing Campaign
- Create and Monitor Sales Compensation
- Make Sales Calls
- Prepare Proposals
- Complete sales call paperwork
- .Buy Advertisement
- Define MICRO-Processes that support Sub- Processes
(e.g. make sales calls)
- Makes sales appointments
- Travel to customer
- Makes sales presentation to current customer
- Makes sales presentation to potential customer
- Assign Process Managers and Executives
- Assign senior Executive for Major Processes for funding and overall
responsibility
- Assign Process Manager for daily responsibility of process
.
- Develop Cross Function Business Process Reports
- Determine frequency of reports
- Determine if reports replace
department reports or if they are additional reports
- Determine software and applications for report
- Determine detail of reports for different levels of management
- Create Capital and Operational Budgets by Cross
Functional Business Processes
- Relate cross functional business process budgets to strategy
- Relate
capital budgets to strategy and cross functional business processes
Call John Antos, Jim Brimson or Pat Dowdle at
972-980-7407
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