Business Process Management and Continuous Improvement

Businesses exist to perform a narrowly defined set of activities that result in them delivering value added products and services to their Customers, with the eventual aim of generating a sustained profit.

Those businesses that consistently perform their core activities more effectively than their competitors tend to prosper, provide Customers with more value, have higher levels of Customer satisfaction, retain their Customers for longer, are less wasteful of resources and, over a period of time, gain market share to the detriment of their competitors. The recipes that businesses use to guide the performance of their core activities are referred to as “Processes”.

It stands to reason that a business’ core processes constitute one of its most valuable assets, as they are the embodiment of all past learning pertaining to the manner in which products and services are most profitably taken to market. The more efficient and effective these processes are, the greater their ability to translate into Customer value, profit and ultimately, the greater their asset value. The primary objective of BPM is to optimize the asset value of a business’ processes. 

BPM systems such as the Therefore BPMS, allow for processes to be rapidly modeled. Once these processes have been modeled, BPM systems can be used to facilitate their execution. The Therefore BPMS refers to modeled Processes as “Tasks”.

A feature of BPM systems is that they enable the rapid modeling of processes without introducing the need for writing code, thereby reducing the length of the BPM project life cycle and shortening the time lag between the initiation of a BPM project and the inflow of the resulting benefits. Further, given that the needs of the market are continually in a state of flux, the processes that a business utilizes to service its market must be continually revised to ensure ongoing market alignment. This requirement for agility dictates that it must be possible to rapidly modify existing business processes as the need arises. The Therefore ThreadBuilder® application enables the rapid creation and modification of processes, thereby ensuring that your business’ processes remain in synergy with both the needs of your market and your strategic direction. 

Best business practice dictates that all service outages are recorded, resolved and then analyzed to allow for the identification of areas of repeat process failure. This discipline is referred to as “Continuous Improvement”. Businesses that do not embrace Continuous Improvement tend to market products and services that are not adequately aligned to the needs of their Customers. This invariably results in them losing market share to their competitors and will eventually lead to their extinction. The Therefore BPMS has been designed to support the implementation of a Continuous Improvement strategy and is compatible with frameworks such as ISO 9001:2000, Lean and Six Sigma. 

Once weaknesses have been identified in processes, they need to be remodeled to ensure that they are rendered less error prone. The Therefore BPMS allows for process failures to be resolved by means of specialized processes referred to as “Queries”. The Therefore BPMS can then be used to analyze query volumes to identify which processes need to be reviewed to optimize Customer value.