Business Process Management: Successfully Adapting to Market Change, Challenge and Opportunityby Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Each day presents a new set of challenges and risks to companies operating in a fast-changing marketplace. Global competition and escalating economic pressures make the business environment both dynamic and difficult. But looking beyond the gloom and doom of the recent headlines, there are still solid prospects for growth, particularly for businesses that effectively leverage their technology investments to create highly efficient and responsive organizations. Increasingly, companies are employing business process management (BPM) enabled by a service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a means to this end. In essence, BPM enabled by SOA provides the technology engine organizations need to address both their trials and opportunities with a flexible foundation they can use to build lean, agile enterprises.  

Companies are adopting SOA principals that support business process management initiatives to accomplish three primary results. First, organizations are looking to improve operating efficiencies and reduce costs through process automation. Second, businesses want to employ BPM enabled by SOA as a means to capitalize on new revenue opportunities and mitigate risk. Finally, enterprises want to create more adaptable businesses through BPM enabled by SOA that will help them react quickly to shifting market dynamics and evolving economic conditions.

Essentially, organizations are seeking out methods to refine their operations in order to navigate often-difficult economic terrain effectively. BPM enabled by SOA offers a clear path to an increasing number of organizations hoping to best these challenges.

Process Automation for Greater Efficiency
While lowering operating costs is always a priority for businesses, the current economic crisis has made it an especially critical consideration. BPM enabled by SOA provides an important base on which companies can build to automate processes across organizations in order to increase operational efficiencies, lower costs and improve productivity. Process automation helps in this effort by reducing errors, streamlining business activities and acting as a catalyst for innovation. 

By removing many manual aspects associated with business operations, companies can standardize processes to ensure compliance with government regulations and industry mandates. Another byproduct of business process automation is the reduction in customer support costs resulting from the successful implementation of self-service applications.

But to effectively automate processes, companies first need to get discrete systems, services and people to work together to create the kind of highly innovative process model that spurs cost cutting and promotes efficiency. Solutions such as IBM WebSphere Process Server help organizations accomplish this by providing an integration framework developers can use to coordinate, map and execute the supporting IT functions that drive process automation. Business users can use WebSphere Process Server to define associated processes and data in a way that allows them to fine-tune the elements within an in-flight process to react more efficiently to changing corporate conditions and other business issues. 

Companies can use IBM WebSphere Integration Developer to build business solutions including processes, adapters and code components. The solution gives developers a visual environment they can use to order the flow of business processes for automation purposes. Business users can track these processes through Business Space, a role-based interface that monitors business objects and spots potential problems that could derail processes and negate the benefits from automation.

Process automation brings tangible benefits fairly quickly. In an effort to keep up with exponential growth while keeping operating costs in check, Vancouver-based North Shore Credit Union turned to BPM enabled by SOA to automate many of its customer support functions so its current staff levels could keep up with increased demand while actually improving customer service. Using a combination of IBM enterprise content management (ECM) and BPM solutions, the credit union successfully automated many formerly paper-based processes, slashing storage and operational costs and providing a mechanism for employees to find information faster, thereby increasing their productivity and improving customer response times. The credit union was able to also cut errors associated with customer-facing processes by 70 percent.

Opportunity and Risk
BPM enabled by SOA also gives companies a mechanism for taking advantage of new prospects and mitigating risks by providing an accurate view of operational processes so organizations can refine processes to react to both challenges and opportunities. At the outset, businesses need to know how their processes are running in order to make whatever adjustments are necessary. IBM offers solutions such as IBM WebSphere Business Monitor to give companies a real-time perspective into business processes, so they can adjust processes and make continuous operational improvements. Organizations also need tools to model their processes. Solutions such as IBM WebSphere Process Modeler help on this front as well, providing process modeling, simulation and analysis so business leaders can better understand and implement business activities. Also, IBM WebSphere Business Events enables business users to identify, assess and quickly react to events.  

Organizations are employing these solutions to better integrate formerly discrete processes and promote more effective operations. A federal agency is applying SOA to increase productivity and lower expenses by improving interdepartmental productivity and supplying a means to deploy applications across the entire organization in a more cost-effective manner. The agency, an IBM customer, has been able to reduce costs by supplanting multiple support structures with a single infrastructure. At the same time, the agency has been able to improve accountability between outside vendors and internal employees by eliminating silos to provide a more transparent view into contract and performance data across the organization.

Adapt and Thrive
This ability to help businesses adapt to change is one of the aspects of BPM enabled by SOA. Organizations tap BPM enabled by SOA to help them expedite application development and promote greater component reuse in order to accelerate their time to market with new products and services. 

IBM offers a number of solutions to promote corporate agility by providing companies with the mechanism to continuously evolve their business processes. For example, WebSphere Business Services Fabric provides a comprehensive platform companies can use to assemble, deploy and manage composite business services. The platform uses industry-specific content packs that include prebuilt SOA assets to help expedite development and implementation time.

Organizations can also use IBM WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition, which provides tools to document and simulate processes — including those involving human workflows — and then execute these processes to meet corporate goals.

IBM also delivers WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, a system companies can use to quickly publish and manage services and policies within a company’s SOA environment in order to institute changes swiftly to meet changing conditions in the marketplace.

The result is the kind of business that is more responsive to market dynamics. This flexibility is especially critical given the complex business environment in which companies compete. BPM enabled by SOA provides the capabilities that companies need to improve upon their existing processes and implement changes that will help them lower costs, differentiate their products from competitors and tap into new markets. BPM enabled by SOA is much more than a survival mechanism; it is really an investment in corporate agility that leads to success.

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Archive of Articles by Amy Larsen DeCarlo

2009
Applying a Role-Based Approach to Business Process Management » Read article