Business processes: how not to automate mess
The years 2006–2008 in business circles were marked by endless discussions on the topic of project and process management. Scientific organizations and institutes gathered entire conferences with the participation of prominent international experts and literally without a break at the coffee break discussed projects and a process approach. A little later, in 2009, at one of the international round tables, a graduate student at a large university thoroughly and very convincingly proved that the process approach and project management in Russia was prepared for a sad end, because "everything that is done in companies is a constant mess."
Fortunately, he was wrong. Modern business proves that project and process management underlies the elimination of confusion in a company. Business processes, in turn, have moved from a theoretical plane to a practical one, largely due to corporate software.
If you pay attention to the market of corporate information systems, including CRM and XRM, there is an obvious tendency to integrate into the system a module for creating and / or managing business processes. Some vendors use standard BPMN 2.0 notation, some prefer native logic schemes - this depends on the developer’s goals and the overall system architecture. When we were developing our XRM-system Ruli24 , business processes were for us perhaps the highest priority: we studied foreign solutions, looked at the available cases, tried to understand the successes and failures of business processes. In general, the accumulated expertise allowed us to form our approach, which we will discuss later. For now - the quintessence of the experience gained by the experts of the Ruli24 team.
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If we turn to the theory of organization and cybernetics, a process is a successive change of states, stages of change and development of a system or other object. For the purpose of managing a company, there are distinguished search, design, production and information processes.
Consider all the groups and find out what are the classic business processes that are paid attention to in management.
Typology of processes and their attributes
Search processes are a sequence of actions that have a research focus: the search for concepts, development strategies, the generation of ideas, and so on. The result of this process cannot be determined in advance. Also, such a process is difficult to formalize, but there are forms of its organization, for example, a meeting, a forum or brainstorming.
The project process occupies a significant place in each company - it is unique and, as a rule, is repeated only once: a one-off advertising campaign, a software implementation project, design and development of a new product. To manage such processes, there are network schedules (such as a special case, the Gantt chart), which determine the sequence and relatedness of work, as well as the resources involved. The result of the project process is predetermined (planned) and unique. The process is controlled using the Project Management methodology, it uses project management automation tools (in the case of Ruli24, this is a separate module).
The information process is a process with the sole purpose of informing participants in related processes and other interested parties. Such processes most often arise in connection with the management of notifications and workflow, they are automated by the SED.
The production process - a periodic routine process, which is determined by the repetition of the same actions in different periods of time. The result of such a process is always planned and not unique. The management of such processes is carried out using route technologies. It is in this group that business processes that are so popular today fall into place - regulated and automated sequences of actions within the company aimed at achieving the planned goals.
Why all this theory? In fact, the statement that only business processes work in a company is incorrect. For example, consider the activities of the sales department. All processes can be involved here: research (search for markets) and information (e-mailing and advertising), and project (work with large customers) and production (work on the mass market, regular promotions, standard cold dialing). Therefore, it is important to understand that there are different types of processes in a company, they can be combined, be nested, but they are never just a business process.
However, in the business turnover, a great deal of attention is now being paid to repetitive, regular, production business processes, therefore, we’ll deal with them later.
Let's try to figure out what caused the interest in business processes. Many of us have heard of a classic example of an algorithm that even university lecturers like - a heated kettle on a gas stove. Virtually everyone no or no may be mistaken in describing the sequence of actions: someone forgets to light a match, someone does not mention the need to check the presence of water in the kettle, etc. ... For all the primitiveness, this is a very telling example from which many properties of business process as an algorithm for performing a chain of actions leading to a result.
Goals and objectives of the business process. Debugged interaction should solve some problems. Best of all, if they are formulated as a goal and several tasks on the way to this goal. For example, the process of “New Year's sale of books”: the goal is to get the maximum income from the sale of books at a discount, the tasks are to set discounts, make changes to the catalog on the site, update the design, make a newsletter. Again, if we are talking about the optimal setting of the business process, then you need to understand that the range of tasks should be divided as much as possible and taken into account in all the departments involved.
Business process time. Any business process must be limited in time. This is one of his key principles - the organization of work and interactions. Each participant in the process must fit into the established time frame. By the way, the use of business process automation systems allows you to quickly find the "weak link" that delays the work of the process and minimizes the human factor, which is not linked to objective reasons for the delay (for example, in Ruli24 you can always see at what stage the process is at the moment).
Stages and key points of the business process. Accurate identification of milestones and control points helps to distribute responsibility between the participants of the process and establish significant events. Let's return to our book sale. In the process of preparing the action, there are three key milestones: the change in prices on the site, the creation of a distribution letter and the fact of sending a letter to the customer base. At the stage from point to point, the deadlines for work can shift, but these points must be executed at the appointed time - only then can the business process be considered successful.
Conditions within the business process. Each stage of the business process should contain important controls: notifications, reports, documents, calls. Based on the results of processing each element and will be the transition to the next stage. For example, for one of the options for mailing design, you need to buy a couple of photos in stock, paying them with a corporate card. If the photo is purchased, the letter goes into the layout, if for some reason the purchase failed, the task remains with the designer and he tries to solve it in a different way.
Means and resources of the business process. The business process can never be considered in isolation from the resources that are necessary for its implementation: time, people, equipment, software, inventory (in the case of production), transport (in the case of logistics) and so on. If the employment of resources is not taken into account when developing a business process, it may remain incomplete and thus the work efficiency will be reduced to zero.
Participants in the business process. No matter how perfect the automation system is, it can never guarantee the execution of a business process. Therefore, at each stage there must be established executors and responsible ones who will control the key points of the project. Most often, the holder or initiator of the process is responsible, but in large production companies often holders are several people.
Information inside the business process. At each stage of the business process, information should be set up: about the transfer of the stage, taking it into work, notification of the holder. Information can be transmitted either by e-mail, manually created by the participants, or through automatic messages generated by the system in response to the onset of a significant event. Of course, the second option is preferable - the system does not waste time and does not forget to report.
The result of the business process. Positive or negative, the result must be: either this is the achievement of a goal, or it is a failure. In case the goal is not achieved, a logging business process map will help to clarify which omissions led to an undesirable outcome. Based on this analysis, you can adjust the existing project.
The advantages and benefits of introducing automated business processes are obvious: acceleration of entry into the market for new companies, increase in the speed of work, increase in the quality and speed of customer service, and cost reduction due to the redistribution of labor. The combination of workflow automation tools, integration with other automation tools (for example, in the case of Ruli24 are modules), management and monitoring can provide significant company benefits: automating and organizing the workflow, reducing the risk of mistakes, meeting deadlines, reducing the cost of training and adapting personnel and so on The combination of these benefits ultimately has a positive impact on the profitability of the business.
You should not limit the use of technology creation and management of business processes by large companies with complex organizational structure - small and medium businesses need them no less. It is safe to say that the business process starts from the moment when the company has more than three people and some routine work: accounting, mailings, cold dialing, orders, delivery, working with suppliers, issuing media numbers and so on ... Activities You can recognize the process, if it is periodically repeated, consists of the same steps, involves the same resources. Process management involves the management of marketing, production, supply, sales, etc ...
In general, business processes are characterized by three mandatory elements:
It happens that the team is not ready for automation, but even in this case one shouldn’t move away from regulating business processes: the minimal action plan drawn up on the whiteboard will make a tangible order in the company's work. Actions to automate business processes should be carefully considered, as there can be many hidden problems and exceptions within the process, which, of course, can lead to a restructuring of the whole concept of implementation and increase the cost of the company's automation project.
At the beginning of the post, we said that we encountered cases of the collapse of the automation of business processes. Typically, such problems are inherited from the general difficulties associated with the implementation of CRM, BPM, XRM, but there are some reasons.
Working on the integrated system Ruli24 , we approached the issue of automating business processes from different perspectives and were guided by the principle “Everything is a process”. The difference is in the order of execution, evaluation of the result and the object to which the process is directed. In most business publications, as well as in many CRM-systems, a business process is a chain of actions related to sales or approval of documents. Recently, a trend has emerged to expand the understanding of an automated business process, but in Ruli24 we came to the need to formalize any routine: from the meeting to the development of new software versions (we use the processes when releasing new releases of the system, which is why all releases occur in the designated term).
So, in Ruli24, experts customize business processes individually for each business, taking into account the finest details. In fact, during implementation, we create a team of a technical officer, Ruli24 business analyst and a manager - the owner of the client company process. It turns out a typical business process that has a start (start condition), work, intersection events and end (end condition). The business process is tied to the object, the responsible executor - the owner of the process. When describing the work, the performers are indicated, the laboriousness of the work. In describing cross-over events, the inbound and outbound jobs and the conditions for starting outbound jobs are indicated.
Then, based on a typical process, process instances are created with a start and end date, as well as a base. In this case, all parameters of the process instance are inherited from the template of the typical process and all fields are automatically filled in, taking into account which employee initiates the process start. Upon completion of the process, it is assigned the status "Closed".
Another important process management tool in the Ruli24 system is the Gantt chart, which is a dynamic process model that displays dependencies, the sequence of work performed in the context of time and involved resources. The Gantt chart reflects both projects and running instances of typical business processes. Using the Gantt chart helps not only to get a full understanding of the employment of resources and the amount of work, but also to identify bottlenecks and problems with the timing of the execution of tasks.
Directly in the interface of the Gantt chart, you can open the project, make changes to it. Stages are visible in the right information panel and when you hover the cursor on the progress bars of tasks. By the way, in Ruli24, on the Gantt chart, in addition to projects, you can display instances of running business processes - in this case, it displays only running jobs. If any work on the process is optional, they are not displayed on the chart.
Due to its versatility, Ruli24 meets the requirements of automation of all types of processes:
search engine automation through time tracking, meeting logging and discussion;
project - automation using a Gantt chart and a project and task management module;
production - automation by creating BPMN-models of business processes, generating generic processes and their instances;
informational - electronic document management module (EDMS).
Thus, Ruli24 provides an integrated approach to managing processes in a company of any level, regardless of the commercial, managerial and production tasks.
No matter how hard the developers try to create business process automation systems, alas, the effectiveness of such programs is low if the company does not understand the process as an element of company management. The randomness of the execution of tasks, shifted deadlines, shifting responsibility - all these factors work against the company and one of the main goals of the business - meeting customer needs and generating income. More than once on Habré there was a phrase written by employees of vendors of various systems - “automated mess (chaos)”. Therefore, we recommend that before implementing a business process management system (especially as part of XRM), carry out a comprehensive analysis of the business, try to describe the processes with available means, understand which points and interactions cause the most serious problems.
When an understanding of business organization as an action comes, then it becomes clear that only well-functioning interactions, a reasonable allocation of time and resources, attention to meaningful actions will lead the company to an intensive development model. In such a company, automated business processes will become a reliable growth point.
Fortunately, he was wrong. Modern business proves that project and process management underlies the elimination of confusion in a company. Business processes, in turn, have moved from a theoretical plane to a practical one, largely due to corporate software.
If you pay attention to the market of corporate information systems, including CRM and XRM, there is an obvious tendency to integrate into the system a module for creating and / or managing business processes. Some vendors use standard BPMN 2.0 notation, some prefer native logic schemes - this depends on the developer’s goals and the overall system architecture. When we were developing our XRM-system Ruli24 , business processes were for us perhaps the highest priority: we studied foreign solutions, looked at the available cases, tried to understand the successes and failures of business processes. In general, the accumulated expertise allowed us to form our approach, which we will discuss later. For now - the quintessence of the experience gained by the experts of the Ruli24 team.
')
Everything is a process: some theory and cybernetics
If we turn to the theory of organization and cybernetics, a process is a successive change of states, stages of change and development of a system or other object. For the purpose of managing a company, there are distinguished search, design, production and information processes.
Consider all the groups and find out what are the classic business processes that are paid attention to in management.
Typology of processes and their attributes
Search processes are a sequence of actions that have a research focus: the search for concepts, development strategies, the generation of ideas, and so on. The result of this process cannot be determined in advance. Also, such a process is difficult to formalize, but there are forms of its organization, for example, a meeting, a forum or brainstorming.
The project process occupies a significant place in each company - it is unique and, as a rule, is repeated only once: a one-off advertising campaign, a software implementation project, design and development of a new product. To manage such processes, there are network schedules (such as a special case, the Gantt chart), which determine the sequence and relatedness of work, as well as the resources involved. The result of the project process is predetermined (planned) and unique. The process is controlled using the Project Management methodology, it uses project management automation tools (in the case of Ruli24, this is a separate module).
The information process is a process with the sole purpose of informing participants in related processes and other interested parties. Such processes most often arise in connection with the management of notifications and workflow, they are automated by the SED.
The production process - a periodic routine process, which is determined by the repetition of the same actions in different periods of time. The result of such a process is always planned and not unique. The management of such processes is carried out using route technologies. It is in this group that business processes that are so popular today fall into place - regulated and automated sequences of actions within the company aimed at achieving the planned goals.
Why all this theory? In fact, the statement that only business processes work in a company is incorrect. For example, consider the activities of the sales department. All processes can be involved here: research (search for markets) and information (e-mailing and advertising), and project (work with large customers) and production (work on the mass market, regular promotions, standard cold dialing). Therefore, it is important to understand that there are different types of processes in a company, they can be combined, be nested, but they are never just a business process.
However, in the business turnover, a great deal of attention is now being paid to repetitive, regular, production business processes, therefore, we’ll deal with them later.
Everything is a process
Let's try to figure out what caused the interest in business processes. Many of us have heard of a classic example of an algorithm that even university lecturers like - a heated kettle on a gas stove. Virtually everyone no or no may be mistaken in describing the sequence of actions: someone forgets to light a match, someone does not mention the need to check the presence of water in the kettle, etc. ... For all the primitiveness, this is a very telling example from which many properties of business process as an algorithm for performing a chain of actions leading to a result.Goals and objectives of the business process. Debugged interaction should solve some problems. Best of all, if they are formulated as a goal and several tasks on the way to this goal. For example, the process of “New Year's sale of books”: the goal is to get the maximum income from the sale of books at a discount, the tasks are to set discounts, make changes to the catalog on the site, update the design, make a newsletter. Again, if we are talking about the optimal setting of the business process, then you need to understand that the range of tasks should be divided as much as possible and taken into account in all the departments involved.
Business process time. Any business process must be limited in time. This is one of his key principles - the organization of work and interactions. Each participant in the process must fit into the established time frame. By the way, the use of business process automation systems allows you to quickly find the "weak link" that delays the work of the process and minimizes the human factor, which is not linked to objective reasons for the delay (for example, in Ruli24 you can always see at what stage the process is at the moment).
Stages and key points of the business process. Accurate identification of milestones and control points helps to distribute responsibility between the participants of the process and establish significant events. Let's return to our book sale. In the process of preparing the action, there are three key milestones: the change in prices on the site, the creation of a distribution letter and the fact of sending a letter to the customer base. At the stage from point to point, the deadlines for work can shift, but these points must be executed at the appointed time - only then can the business process be considered successful.
Conditions within the business process. Each stage of the business process should contain important controls: notifications, reports, documents, calls. Based on the results of processing each element and will be the transition to the next stage. For example, for one of the options for mailing design, you need to buy a couple of photos in stock, paying them with a corporate card. If the photo is purchased, the letter goes into the layout, if for some reason the purchase failed, the task remains with the designer and he tries to solve it in a different way.
Means and resources of the business process. The business process can never be considered in isolation from the resources that are necessary for its implementation: time, people, equipment, software, inventory (in the case of production), transport (in the case of logistics) and so on. If the employment of resources is not taken into account when developing a business process, it may remain incomplete and thus the work efficiency will be reduced to zero.
Participants in the business process. No matter how perfect the automation system is, it can never guarantee the execution of a business process. Therefore, at each stage there must be established executors and responsible ones who will control the key points of the project. Most often, the holder or initiator of the process is responsible, but in large production companies often holders are several people.
Information inside the business process. At each stage of the business process, information should be set up: about the transfer of the stage, taking it into work, notification of the holder. Information can be transmitted either by e-mail, manually created by the participants, or through automatic messages generated by the system in response to the onset of a significant event. Of course, the second option is preferable - the system does not waste time and does not forget to report.
The result of the business process. Positive or negative, the result must be: either this is the achievement of a goal, or it is a failure. In case the goal is not achieved, a logging business process map will help to clarify which omissions led to an undesirable outcome. Based on this analysis, you can adjust the existing project.
The advantages and benefits of introducing automated business processes are obvious: acceleration of entry into the market for new companies, increase in the speed of work, increase in the quality and speed of customer service, and cost reduction due to the redistribution of labor. The combination of workflow automation tools, integration with other automation tools (for example, in the case of Ruli24 are modules), management and monitoring can provide significant company benefits: automating and organizing the workflow, reducing the risk of mistakes, meeting deadlines, reducing the cost of training and adapting personnel and so on The combination of these benefits ultimately has a positive impact on the profitability of the business.
Business processes: transition difficulties
You should not limit the use of technology creation and management of business processes by large companies with complex organizational structure - small and medium businesses need them no less. It is safe to say that the business process starts from the moment when the company has more than three people and some routine work: accounting, mailings, cold dialing, orders, delivery, working with suppliers, issuing media numbers and so on ... Activities You can recognize the process, if it is periodically repeated, consists of the same steps, involves the same resources. Process management involves the management of marketing, production, supply, sales, etc ...
In general, business processes are characterized by three mandatory elements:
- stable links (transitions, conditions, multiple choice, etc.)
- actions during the process (including notifications, calls, attached documents)
- result (goal achieved).
It happens that the team is not ready for automation, but even in this case one shouldn’t move away from regulating business processes: the minimal action plan drawn up on the whiteboard will make a tangible order in the company's work. Actions to automate business processes should be carefully considered, as there can be many hidden problems and exceptions within the process, which, of course, can lead to a restructuring of the whole concept of implementation and increase the cost of the company's automation project.
At the beginning of the post, we said that we encountered cases of the collapse of the automation of business processes. Typically, such problems are inherited from the general difficulties associated with the implementation of CRM, BPM, XRM, but there are some reasons.
- The refusal of employees to automate or organize the process - many team members are afraid to fall under the staff reduction caused by the automation of part of the tasks. However, an experienced and competent manager always knows that an employee trained by a company can always be moved within the company with maximum efficiency and satisfaction from all sides. In case refusal to use business processes is associated with technical difficulties, it is worth spending time on training employees and building internal expertise in the company.
- Illiterately composed process. This is perhaps the most common source of discontent with automation tools. Employees of the company miss important details when drawing up the process - this is most often due to the lack of joint preparation for the creation of a typical business process and its instances. But the most dangerous thing vendors face is the free interpretation of BPMN notation, which is used to model business processes. The notation itself is aimed at a wide range of users: managers, technical specialists, managers, and so on. It does not require deep knowledge of programming or design, its semantic constructions are created from elements with intuitive notation. Such its apparent simplicity and similarity with the designer and joke a cruel joke with users.
In fact, the successful creation of a business process using notation is possible only in a team consisting of a business analyst, technical specialist and an interested manager-holder of the process. If a company needs to introduce a complex process (production, procurement, advertising, publishing, etc.), it is better to turn to third-party specialists who will conduct a comprehensive survey of the process and create an ideal automated scheme. The participation of professionals is especially justified if it is necessary to link tasks from business processes with formalized documents in the system, for example, contracts, invoices, invoices, work orders, and so on. - Rejection of the process. The company may abandon the existing automated business process in case the activity has changed, and in the system it remains the same. In this case, you need to make changes to the process on your own or with the help of a vendor, and not to avoid it.
How we did business processes
Working on the integrated system Ruli24 , we approached the issue of automating business processes from different perspectives and were guided by the principle “Everything is a process”. The difference is in the order of execution, evaluation of the result and the object to which the process is directed. In most business publications, as well as in many CRM-systems, a business process is a chain of actions related to sales or approval of documents. Recently, a trend has emerged to expand the understanding of an automated business process, but in Ruli24 we came to the need to formalize any routine: from the meeting to the development of new software versions (we use the processes when releasing new releases of the system, which is why all releases occur in the designated term).
So, in Ruli24, experts customize business processes individually for each business, taking into account the finest details. In fact, during implementation, we create a team of a technical officer, Ruli24 business analyst and a manager - the owner of the client company process. It turns out a typical business process that has a start (start condition), work, intersection events and end (end condition). The business process is tied to the object, the responsible executor - the owner of the process. When describing the work, the performers are indicated, the laboriousness of the work. In describing cross-over events, the inbound and outbound jobs and the conditions for starting outbound jobs are indicated.
Then, based on a typical process, process instances are created with a start and end date, as well as a base. In this case, all parameters of the process instance are inherited from the template of the typical process and all fields are automatically filled in, taking into account which employee initiates the process start. Upon completion of the process, it is assigned the status "Closed".
Another important process management tool in the Ruli24 system is the Gantt chart, which is a dynamic process model that displays dependencies, the sequence of work performed in the context of time and involved resources. The Gantt chart reflects both projects and running instances of typical business processes. Using the Gantt chart helps not only to get a full understanding of the employment of resources and the amount of work, but also to identify bottlenecks and problems with the timing of the execution of tasks.
Directly in the interface of the Gantt chart, you can open the project, make changes to it. Stages are visible in the right information panel and when you hover the cursor on the progress bars of tasks. By the way, in Ruli24, on the Gantt chart, in addition to projects, you can display instances of running business processes - in this case, it displays only running jobs. If any work on the process is optional, they are not displayed on the chart.
Due to its versatility, Ruli24 meets the requirements of automation of all types of processes:
search engine automation through time tracking, meeting logging and discussion; project - automation using a Gantt chart and a project and task management module; production - automation by creating BPMN-models of business processes, generating generic processes and their instances; informational - electronic document management module (EDMS).Thus, Ruli24 provides an integrated approach to managing processes in a company of any level, regardless of the commercial, managerial and production tasks.
No matter how hard the developers try to create business process automation systems, alas, the effectiveness of such programs is low if the company does not understand the process as an element of company management. The randomness of the execution of tasks, shifted deadlines, shifting responsibility - all these factors work against the company and one of the main goals of the business - meeting customer needs and generating income. More than once on Habré there was a phrase written by employees of vendors of various systems - “automated mess (chaos)”. Therefore, we recommend that before implementing a business process management system (especially as part of XRM), carry out a comprehensive analysis of the business, try to describe the processes with available means, understand which points and interactions cause the most serious problems.
When an understanding of business organization as an action comes, then it becomes clear that only well-functioning interactions, a reasonable allocation of time and resources, attention to meaningful actions will lead the company to an intensive development model. In such a company, automated business processes will become a reliable growth point.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/272177/
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