Summary of What is Business Process Management( by Michael Hammer) & my ideas around it

Business Process Management (BPM) is a comprehensive system for managing and transforming organizational operations. The essential process management cycle is:

Once a process is in place, it needs to be managed on an ongoing basis. Its performance, in terms of critical metrics that relate to customer needs and company requirements, needs to be compared to the targets for these metrics. Such targets can be based on customer expectations, competitor benchmarks, enterprise needs, and other sources. If performance does not meet targets, the reason for this shortcoming must be determined. Broadly speaking, processes fail to meet performance requirements either because of faulty design or faulty execution; which one is the culprit can generally be determined by examining the pattern of performance inadequacy.

The enablers of process are: Process design, Process metrics, Process performers, Process infrastructure and Process owner.

The principles of process management is All work is process work. Sometimes the assumption is made that the concepts of process and process management only apply to highly structured, transactional work, such as order fulfillment, procurement, customer service, and the like.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The virtues of process also adhere to developmental processes, which center on highly creative tasks, such as product development, demand creation, and so on. Process should not be misinterpreted as a synonym for routinization or automation, reducing creative work to simplistic procedures. Process means positioning individual work activities – routine or creative – in the larger context of the other activities with which it combines to create results. Both transactional and development processes are what is known as core processes. In general:

• Any process is better than no process.
• A good process is better than a bad process.
• One process version is better than many.
• Even a good process must be performed effectively.
• Even a good process can be made better.
• Every good process eventually becomes a bad process.

The foundation of process management is the Enterprise Process Model (EPM). This is a graphical representation of the enterprise’s processes (core, enabling, and governing), showing their interconnections and inputs and outputs.

BPMS software is principally used for two kinds of purposes: to create descriptions of processes (in terms of their constituent activities), which can be used to support process analysis, simulation, and design efforts; and to generate executable code that supports the performance of a process, by automating certain process steps, integrating systems and databases used by the process, and managing the workflow of documents and other forms passing through the process.

The frontiers of BPM are: Management structure and responsibility, IT support, Inter enterprise processes, Standards, Processes and strategy, Industry structure.

I think BPM is a very effective way of seeing the big picture, at the same time the details without going through so much expense. A manager can see the whole picture from the start to the end, visualize the gaps and also predict the difficult areas, and then it will be very beneficial and effective to go through the implementation of the real systems by strategizing and applying best practices, and implementation of the know how during the all phases of process life cycle.

And Hammer’s article is stating that process management is paying off in so many ways through creating high performance processes, which creates low costs, fast speeds, greater accuracy, reduced assets, and enhanced flexibility and in practice we can experience the truth of this statement.