Business Process or Workflow and the BPMN Standard

McKinsey & Company is the trusted advisor and counselor to many of the world’s most influential businesses and institutions. They are one of the leading proponents that the best way to run a business is to balance short-term performance and long-term health. The proof based on their OHI (Organizational Health Index) is that those organizations that to do perform 3 x times better than those who don’t. This advice continues into organizational functions such as sales when another advisor in this field, Sales Benchmark Index (SBI) outlines that when you properly structure your SaaS business sale sales force that it has been proven to produce a 2 x revenue uplift.

OK great advice for the big boys who can afford McKinsey and SBI. How do the rest of us manage? “

The prevailing paradigm that has underpinned business for the past 50 years is beginning to shift” According to another global consultant, Bain & Company. Effectively your SaaS business may become the firm of the future, which will deliver the benefits of scale and intimacy better and faster (customer experience) to customers in a turbulent environment. The fact is that how way we work today is a legacy of hundreds of years of thinking about the way work is best performed. This thinking was mostly process based on evolving from methods developed by Adam Smith through to today with Six Sigma, Agile, and much more. All of which helped us improve our quality of life, manufacture products at low costs, and, basically, transform life on earth. Going forward, as long as we are continuing to look at new ways of adding value to organizations the future of this type of process thinking will continue. So how does reviewing business process help each of us?

“A business process, business method or business function is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks by people or equipment in which a specific sequence produces a service or product (serves a particular business goal) for a particular customer or customers. Business processes occur at all organizational levels and may or may not be visible to the customers. A business process may often be visualized (modeled) as a flowchart of a sequence of activities with interleaving decision points or as a process matrix of a sequence of activities with relevance rules based on data in the process. The benefits of using business processes include improved customer satisfaction and improved agility for reacting to rapid market change. Process-oriented organizations break down the barriers of structural departments and try to avoid functional silos.” Source Wikipedia

Why should organizations spend so much time and effort on modeling their processes? Well simply, it is to communicate through diagrams the process logic – how the process starts and ends, and the order of the steps – completely and clearly to those who don’t already know how it works. That way all stakeholders are on the same page for understanding a given process in the same way. When that happens your firm will move from chaos to greatness.

Today shifting the paradigm needs to involve and empower all stakeholders, for your revenue growth approach to succeed. Certainly traditional swim-lane flowcharts help pave the way for defining a process(es), or “a systematic series of actions directed to some end”. It helps lay out:

• The steps in a process are actions,
• The results a process seeks to achieve,
• The plan or rules a process follows

Now add-in the latest paradigm shift with traditional swim-lane flowcharts, which is arguably its evolution to BPMN, which stands for Business Process Model and Notation, or a diagramming language for business process models. It is important not because it is superior in every way to other process notations, but because it is a multi-vendor standard, maintained by the Object Management Group (OMG), and widely adopted by modelers and tool vendors alike.

More importantly it allows subject-matter (non-techie) experts of a given process, instead of to work with programmers to define the process(es). Where a BPMN process model describe one possible path from start to end as well as all possible paths. That’s because a BPMN process is something performed repeatedly – not continuously – in the course of business. It is a step-by-step recipe leading from a blank page to a complete process model that reveals the process logic clearly from the printed diagram. The goal is not creativity but structural consistency that all can understand. BPMN diagrams can be drawn by hand, but BPMN assumes use of a software tool. This is because the unique difference of BPMN is allowing subject matter experts to export an executable BPMN which IT can use to further improve existing supporting IT systems.

For example, you are a good size SaaS business that grew fast or bought smaller companies or hired a lot related to your growth. Proportionately, you are a enterprise size SaaS business who just bought out three other companies. In both cases, everyone or each division are still experienced using their respective ERP systems prior to the buy-out. As a result you bring the various stakeholders to come together and agree on a mutually beneficial processes. Let’s say you begin with the order entry system. The resulting BPMN executable can be exported or accessed via API to reconfigure each ERP. Thus aligning everyone’s ERP with the same order management process. For a global enterprise client, they were able to do so in half the time regarding project’s implementation planned time, at a third of the project cost while saving millions.

bEffective services can help you with analysis for optimizing your processes. In the interim please do avail yourself of what’s available in our resource section or opt-in to our newsletter for tips and techniques.

“If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.” – Albert Einstein