What it is - BPM, and how companies build it
Now no one will dispute the need, the usefulness of the description and regulation of business processes in the enterprise. There is a very large number of tools for describing business processes. In this article you will find their classification. I hope it will help professionals who are engaged in process approaches in the work of companies to orient themselves on the BPM market. In addition, I will tell you what practical benefits BPM tools can bring and how things are going with their implementation in Russia. The article has a lot of diagrams, and all of them are clickable.
“At least 40% of businesses will die within the next 10 years if they do not decide how to change the work of their companies using new technologies.”
Joni Chambers , Executive Director, Cisco Systems
“The economy explores large economic mechanisms. Experiments on them are almost as difficult as on black holes. ”
Sergey Guriev , economist
')
The analyst and the manager are often faced with the difficult choice of which tool for describing business processes to give preference. To facilitate market analysis, I tried to depict the groups of BPM solutions in the diagram. It is based on data from the monograph by Vladimir Repin and Vitaly Eliferov, as well as from other sources on the Internet.
Fig. 1. Business process methodologies (all abbreviations are given at the end of the article)
As can be seen from the diagram, the methodologies in the description of business processes are divided into four main areas. In this case, separate notations for constructing business schemes are often used in various types of methodologies.
PLM programs are positioned as a separate fifth block (Product Lifecycle Management, management of data on an industrial product throughout its life cycle, starting from its design, manufacture, and ending with maintenance (support) of the finished product and its disposal).
The latest versions of such programs (CATIA, DELMIA, ENOVIA, SmarTeam products) can confidently be attributed to programs for describing business processes, since they take into account all aspects of product development — not only design and manufacturing, but also modeling of production flows, building enterprise planning diagrams manufacturer, supply of components, ergonomics of workplaces, organizational issues. Here I will not consider this block of programs because of its specificity.
It is clear that at the same time to meet all the requirements of a particular product can not. How to choose? The most obvious option is to trace the frequency of use.
Googling is enough to see that the most popular group of practical methods and tools is MS Visio, BPM 2.0 modeler for Visio. In our diagram, they are assigned to workflow models. They write about MS Visio as the most accessible product (it is owned by the maximum number of specialists). It allows building business processes in IDEF0, BPMN and EPC notations, in recent versions there is a check of BPMN schemes built in notation (there is no simulation, unfortunately).
A very common approach to building business processes is to draw graphical diagrams using the simple tools listed above, mostly in manual mode. This option allows you to comprehend the sequence of different procedures or stages of the technological (business) process, allows the analyst to transfer the constructed scheme to the programmer to automate some element of this process.
As a typical example of such an approach, I give below diagrams built in MS Visio in BPMN and EPC notations (Fig. 2 and 3), which describe the business process for calculating the cost of staying in a room when ordering in a boarding house.
Fig. 2. Calculating the cost of a room in a boarding house in notation BPMN (MS Visio)
The instruction governing the calculation of the cost includes a multi-page text, and it will take at least several days to read and master it. The diagrams are drawn up in strict accordance with this instruction, but, naturally, they do not replace it, but complement it - due to their simplicity and clarity, they save time on calculations.
Fig. 3. Calculating the cost of a room in a boarding house in EPC notation (MS Visio)
It should be noted that the diagram in BPMN better illustrates the business process itself and is more suitable for subsequent automation. In this case, the diagram in the EPC is more intuitive.
Below, under the cut, is another, somewhat unexpected example. A long time ago, while studying at the institute, I tried in vain to study the three volumes of K. Marx's Capital. It turned out that, having transferred almost forty chapters of two volumes of this outstanding work into diagrams and diagrams, one can not only understand the contents of these volumes, but also remember them in just a few hours!
If you can, you can “trump up” that you have learned by heart the works of K. Marx. Nor do you have to read the most detailed controversy of the economist with his numerous opponents-enemies, whose names today have sunk into oblivion for the majority.
Are such diagrams useful, do they help management and performers?
The value of such diagrams is obvious, although they solve limited tasks - they help to understand the chain of actions, the sequence of operations or procedures in a separate elementary process (for its subsequent automation, if necessary). More from such schemes should not be expected.
The stereotypes, which are dominated by companies that implement the methods of the process approach, are well described in the book by Vladimir Repin and Vitaly Eliferov, which I have already mentioned:
How can you not recall the aphorism of Henry Ford: "Gymnastics is complete nonsense, healthy is not needed, and the patient is contraindicated"?
If it is serious, then in the current unfavorable business situation, when competition is growing, production is declining, all new sanctions appear, the process approach becomes especially relevant for understanding the company's activities.
So, what can a company actually get if it registers all its business processes from top to bottom , what should be the goal of such a very cumbersome work?
I tried to find the answer to this question by participating in two conferences:
At the contest “BPM Project of the Year 2017”, 19 BPM projects from various regions of Russia were reviewed. Two projects concerned management automation, three projects - management regulations, six projects were devoted to optimizing business processes (ie, reducing time and labor costs for one or another element of the process), and finally, the most numerous group - eight projects - concerned developing automation routine processes and procedures in enterprises. According to the jury of the competition, the latter group provides the greatest economic effect from the regulation of business processes. And the overall assessment of the jury is not so bad in Russia with the development of tools for describing business processes.
Most of the projects presented the so-called mature BPM, in which all business processes in an enterprise can be viewed as cross-cutting. In this case, problem areas that occur at the junctions of processes and divisions are revealed much more prominently.
The first prize was given to the project “Automation of the processes of the common service center (SSC) for the management of HR-services”, presented by a large metallurgical and mining company EVRAZ (the number of employees is up to 80,000 people worldwide). The aim of the project was to automate the entire contour of the business projects of the SSC as part of the provision of HR services. With the help of the bpm'online product line, 200 employees of the SSC and 80 business processes were automated. More than 5,000 applications for HR inquiries are processed daily in compliance with the standards and deadlines for completing tasks; the processing time for HR issues has been halved.
An interesting project is the Tyulgansky Machine-Building Plant, which produces drilling equipment, which won the prize in the nomination "The most effective project." Optimization of the organization of production processes a year after the project implementation led to an increase in production in physical terms by 144%. Labor productivity increased by 88%, the average delivery time of products decreased from 210 days to 180 days.
“The best BPM project among government organizations” recognized the project “Business Process Management” implemented by Sberbank. As you know, Sberbank has 137 million customers and representative offices in 22 countries. Sberbank's customers could notice very positive changes in its work - reducing service time, a comprehensive transition to digital methods of working with clients. More globally (as Sberbank itself evaluates the results of implementing BPM – processes), these are closed loop BPM technologies, a single model of the business process of a bank’s activities, the definition of a system of related processes, etc.
The conferences presented a variety of examples of successful implementation of the description of business processes. In a report by Igor Lozovitsky “Functional and cost analysis. Successful practice of application ” shows the calculation of the cost of business processes, the calculation of the recommended number of employees of structural units and the calculation of the average annual cost of customer service (applied to the non-state pension fund“ Future ”).
I note absolutely nontrivial results of this work. Thus, the constructed business process allowed identifying its specific elements that require optimization: intra-depository transfers, opening and maintaining bank accounts of legal entities, calculations based on trading results on exchanges, etc.
As a result, the time for entering orders decreased from 30 to 1 minutes, the number of errors when entering orders decreased from 10% to 1%. It was possible to calculate the recommended number of employees and determine the compliance of this number with the level of controllability. Recommendations were made to reduce the average annual cost of customer service by 21%, and they were implemented. The financial results of the use of the business process are even more impressive - the total costs for the year have significantly decreased and the product revenue has increased.
Conference participants to build business processes recommend using a domestic product, Business Studio, which is convenient for using IDEF0 notation when building top and second level processes. For the purpose of further decomposition of the business process for the third and fourth levels, BPMN and EPC notations are recommended. In addition, Business Studio is convenient for generating various reports (forming organizational structure of an enterprise and business units, financial indicators).
However, this product, built with the expectation of universality, is rather cumbersome and difficult to master. I am not alone in such a judgment; in particular , a similar opinion was expressed here at Habré . It is more expedient, at least at the first stage, to use simpler tools (Procedure notation in BS, MS Visio) to describe business processes in separate divisions, to describe the movement of financial documents, sales processes, work with clients, etc. .
The projects reviewed proved to be successful, as a team of highly qualified BPM specialists worked in them for quite a long time. Not every company can afford to attract pros, so most enterprises build business processes on their own, attracting their employees or creating a specialized unit from among their employees.
A source
But in this case, the business is faced with the reluctance of employees to bear the additional burden. Vladimir Repin spoke at length about the lack of motivation in his report “Involving managers and employees in working with business processes” .
Forced motivation can sometimes give a successful result, but only with the involvement of staff through a whole range of activities: training and certification of employees, visual agitation, rewards and rewards for the successful implementation of projects.
The most important thing in this process is for management to realize the need for the integrated implementation of business processes at the enterprise architecture level. As E. Deming said, “Success in the struggle for quality is 94% dependent on managers and 6% on workers.”
The conference reports emphasized that in order to expect success from describing business processes, mastering the process approach, constant practice of working with processes as a key tool for engagement is necessary.
And the most important thing is that this work style becomes permanent in the team: a clear role structure has been created for working with processes (including the responsibility and powers of the owners of the processes, process managers, process division, working groups); created and fixed permanent practice actions to work with the processes (as is the case with the formation of work plans, vacation schedules, payroll); created incentive system.
So, we will assume that the management was inspired by the idea of ​​using business processes, we ourselves realized the need to introduce a description of business processes in our enterprise, so what should be the ultimate goal of this work?
V. Eliferov believes that describing business processes is not the goal of the project. Description of business processes is a tool to improve business performance through the use of an integrated approach to build a business architecture in five directions simultaneously.
Here we come to the concept of a complete digital transformation of processes in the company. What does this mean in addition to high speed of process execution, cost reduction, productivity increase, etc.?
This is the generation of innovative projects, high speed of adaptation for the client’s tasks, full disclosure of each employee’s potential, ecology and safety, effective employee communication when performing cross-cutting processes (well, communism, the right word), which ultimately enhances the company's sustainability in fierce competition.
A source
Abbreviations:
“At least 40% of businesses will die within the next 10 years if they do not decide how to change the work of their companies using new technologies.”
Joni Chambers , Executive Director, Cisco Systems
“The economy explores large economic mechanisms. Experiments on them are almost as difficult as on black holes. ”
Sergey Guriev , economist
')
The analyst and the manager are often faced with the difficult choice of which tool for describing business processes to give preference. To facilitate market analysis, I tried to depict the groups of BPM solutions in the diagram. It is based on data from the monograph by Vladimir Repin and Vitaly Eliferov, as well as from other sources on the Internet.
As can be seen from the diagram, the methodologies in the description of business processes are divided into four main areas. In this case, separate notations for constructing business schemes are often used in various types of methodologies.
PLM programs are positioned as a separate fifth block (Product Lifecycle Management, management of data on an industrial product throughout its life cycle, starting from its design, manufacture, and ending with maintenance (support) of the finished product and its disposal).
The latest versions of such programs (CATIA, DELMIA, ENOVIA, SmarTeam products) can confidently be attributed to programs for describing business processes, since they take into account all aspects of product development — not only design and manufacturing, but also modeling of production flows, building enterprise planning diagrams manufacturer, supply of components, ergonomics of workplaces, organizational issues. Here I will not consider this block of programs because of its specificity.
The choice of a particular BPM solution can determine various criteria:
- frequency of use by other users;
- simplicity, clarity, ease of development, speed drawing schemes;
- the breadth of the spectrum of possibilities (uploading results to various publicly available formats, the ability to verify the constructed process and the possibility of simulation);
- the ability to describe very complex, extensive corporate processes;
- availability, cost.
It is clear that at the same time to meet all the requirements of a particular product can not. How to choose? The most obvious option is to trace the frequency of use.
Googling is enough to see that the most popular group of practical methods and tools is MS Visio, BPM 2.0 modeler for Visio. In our diagram, they are assigned to workflow models. They write about MS Visio as the most accessible product (it is owned by the maximum number of specialists). It allows building business processes in IDEF0, BPMN and EPC notations, in recent versions there is a check of BPMN schemes built in notation (there is no simulation, unfortunately).
A very common approach to building business processes is to draw graphical diagrams using the simple tools listed above, mostly in manual mode. This option allows you to comprehend the sequence of different procedures or stages of the technological (business) process, allows the analyst to transfer the constructed scheme to the programmer to automate some element of this process.
As a typical example of such an approach, I give below diagrams built in MS Visio in BPMN and EPC notations (Fig. 2 and 3), which describe the business process for calculating the cost of staying in a room when ordering in a boarding house.
The instruction governing the calculation of the cost includes a multi-page text, and it will take at least several days to read and master it. The diagrams are drawn up in strict accordance with this instruction, but, naturally, they do not replace it, but complement it - due to their simplicity and clarity, they save time on calculations.
It should be noted that the diagram in BPMN better illustrates the business process itself and is more suitable for subsequent automation. In this case, the diagram in the EPC is more intuitive.
Below, under the cut, is another, somewhat unexpected example. A long time ago, while studying at the institute, I tried in vain to study the three volumes of K. Marx's Capital. It turned out that, having transferred almost forty chapters of two volumes of this outstanding work into diagrams and diagrams, one can not only understand the contents of these volumes, but also remember them in just a few hours!
Selectively posting several diagrams from the two volumes of Capital.
If you can, you can “trump up” that you have learned by heart the works of K. Marx. Nor do you have to read the most detailed controversy of the economist with his numerous opponents-enemies, whose names today have sunk into oblivion for the majority.
Are such diagrams useful, do they help management and performers?
The value of such diagrams is obvious, although they solve limited tasks - they help to understand the chain of actions, the sequence of operations or procedures in a separate elementary process (for its subsequent automation, if necessary). More from such schemes should not be expected.
Do we need BPM if we understand everything and everything is good?
The stereotypes, which are dominated by companies that implement the methods of the process approach, are well described in the book by Vladimir Repin and Vitaly Eliferov, which I have already mentioned:
- BPM is needed simply because it is effective, interesting, cool, clever, beautiful, fashionable, they do it in the USA, etc .;
- It is necessary to apply new methods of the process approach, for this you need to train employees or additionally hire more business analysts, and work with business processes will be established;
- It is necessary to issue an order “Implement a process approach from a certain date,” and the company's business processes will be built.
How can you not recall the aphorism of Henry Ford: "Gymnastics is complete nonsense, healthy is not needed, and the patient is contraindicated"?
If it is serious, then in the current unfavorable business situation, when competition is growing, production is declining, all new sanctions appear, the process approach becomes especially relevant for understanding the company's activities.
So, what can a company actually get if it registers all its business processes from top to bottom , what should be the goal of such a very cumbersome work?
I tried to find the answer to this question by participating in two conferences:
- Results of the contest "BPM-project of the year 2017" (organized by the association of BPM-professionals ABPMP Russian Chapter),
- “Designing Business Architectures” (dedicated to designing and developing companies based on a systematic approach. Organizers - Modern Control Technologies Group and Business Studio for Professionals club ).
Not so bad in Russia with BPM
At the contest “BPM Project of the Year 2017”, 19 BPM projects from various regions of Russia were reviewed. Two projects concerned management automation, three projects - management regulations, six projects were devoted to optimizing business processes (ie, reducing time and labor costs for one or another element of the process), and finally, the most numerous group - eight projects - concerned developing automation routine processes and procedures in enterprises. According to the jury of the competition, the latter group provides the greatest economic effect from the regulation of business processes. And the overall assessment of the jury is not so bad in Russia with the development of tools for describing business processes.
Most of the projects presented the so-called mature BPM, in which all business processes in an enterprise can be viewed as cross-cutting. In this case, problem areas that occur at the junctions of processes and divisions are revealed much more prominently.
The first prize was given to the project “Automation of the processes of the common service center (SSC) for the management of HR-services”, presented by a large metallurgical and mining company EVRAZ (the number of employees is up to 80,000 people worldwide). The aim of the project was to automate the entire contour of the business projects of the SSC as part of the provision of HR services. With the help of the bpm'online product line, 200 employees of the SSC and 80 business processes were automated. More than 5,000 applications for HR inquiries are processed daily in compliance with the standards and deadlines for completing tasks; the processing time for HR issues has been halved.
An interesting project is the Tyulgansky Machine-Building Plant, which produces drilling equipment, which won the prize in the nomination "The most effective project." Optimization of the organization of production processes a year after the project implementation led to an increase in production in physical terms by 144%. Labor productivity increased by 88%, the average delivery time of products decreased from 210 days to 180 days.
“The best BPM project among government organizations” recognized the project “Business Process Management” implemented by Sberbank. As you know, Sberbank has 137 million customers and representative offices in 22 countries. Sberbank's customers could notice very positive changes in its work - reducing service time, a comprehensive transition to digital methods of working with clients. More globally (as Sberbank itself evaluates the results of implementing BPM – processes), these are closed loop BPM technologies, a single model of the business process of a bank’s activities, the definition of a system of related processes, etc.
Sberbank has been engaged in process optimization in recent years. At one time, LANIT BP's experts helped the bank automate 12 business processes based on the Pega RULES Process Commander BPM platform: individuals' credit transactions, payment of deposit compensation, legal entity account management, loan application processing, military pensions, foreign exchange control of legal entities, etc. The developed solution was implemented in the Moscow region and adapted for replication throughout Russia.
In addition, on the basis of Pega RULES Process Commander, the activities of the Legal Department were automated at the bank: a single window was created for the internal client, serving more than 3 thousand users. Due to the emergence of end-to-end processing of incoming requests, the ability to control deadlines and detailed statistics on which employee handles which task, the workload of the legal department has decreased.
The conferences presented a variety of examples of successful implementation of the description of business processes. In a report by Igor Lozovitsky “Functional and cost analysis. Successful practice of application ” shows the calculation of the cost of business processes, the calculation of the recommended number of employees of structural units and the calculation of the average annual cost of customer service (applied to the non-state pension fund“ Future ”).
I note absolutely nontrivial results of this work. Thus, the constructed business process allowed identifying its specific elements that require optimization: intra-depository transfers, opening and maintaining bank accounts of legal entities, calculations based on trading results on exchanges, etc.
As a result, the time for entering orders decreased from 30 to 1 minutes, the number of errors when entering orders decreased from 10% to 1%. It was possible to calculate the recommended number of employees and determine the compliance of this number with the level of controllability. Recommendations were made to reduce the average annual cost of customer service by 21%, and they were implemented. The financial results of the use of the business process are even more impressive - the total costs for the year have significantly decreased and the product revenue has increased.
Conference participants to build business processes recommend using a domestic product, Business Studio, which is convenient for using IDEF0 notation when building top and second level processes. For the purpose of further decomposition of the business process for the third and fourth levels, BPMN and EPC notations are recommended. In addition, Business Studio is convenient for generating various reports (forming organizational structure of an enterprise and business units, financial indicators).
However, this product, built with the expectation of universality, is rather cumbersome and difficult to master. I am not alone in such a judgment; in particular , a similar opinion was expressed here at Habré . It is more expedient, at least at the first stage, to use simpler tools (Procedure notation in BS, MS Visio) to describe business processes in separate divisions, to describe the movement of financial documents, sales processes, work with clients, etc. .
How to replenish a number of successful cases?
The projects reviewed proved to be successful, as a team of highly qualified BPM specialists worked in them for quite a long time. Not every company can afford to attract pros, so most enterprises build business processes on their own, attracting their employees or creating a specialized unit from among their employees.
But in this case, the business is faced with the reluctance of employees to bear the additional burden. Vladimir Repin spoke at length about the lack of motivation in his report “Involving managers and employees in working with business processes” .
Forced motivation can sometimes give a successful result, but only with the involvement of staff through a whole range of activities: training and certification of employees, visual agitation, rewards and rewards for the successful implementation of projects.
The most important thing in this process is for management to realize the need for the integrated implementation of business processes at the enterprise architecture level. As E. Deming said, “Success in the struggle for quality is 94% dependent on managers and 6% on workers.”
“The problem of building an effective organization management system is not that people know little about it, the problem is that it seems to them that they know everything.”
Igor Lozovitsky. “Leader, motivated for development”
The conference reports emphasized that in order to expect success from describing business processes, mastering the process approach, constant practice of working with processes as a key tool for engagement is necessary.
And the most important thing is that this work style becomes permanent in the team: a clear role structure has been created for working with processes (including the responsibility and powers of the owners of the processes, process managers, process division, working groups); created and fixed permanent practice actions to work with the processes (as is the case with the formation of work plans, vacation schedules, payroll); created incentive system.
So, we will assume that the management was inspired by the idea of ​​using business processes, we ourselves realized the need to introduce a description of business processes in our enterprise, so what should be the ultimate goal of this work?
We remember the main thing
V. Eliferov believes that describing business processes is not the goal of the project. Description of business processes is a tool to improve business performance through the use of an integrated approach to build a business architecture in five directions simultaneously.
- Business processes of company management (Regulation of the work of the blocks of accounting, decision-making and planning)
- Design business processes (Standardization of design work)
- Technological business processes (Documenting technologies and improving technology reproducibility)
- Procedural business processes (Standardization of common procedures, creation of universal business processes performed on a role basis)
- Executable business processes (Automation of routine operations - document flow, information exchange, etc.)
Here we come to the concept of a complete digital transformation of processes in the company. What does this mean in addition to high speed of process execution, cost reduction, productivity increase, etc.?
This is the generation of innovative projects, high speed of adaptation for the client’s tasks, full disclosure of each employee’s potential, ecology and safety, effective employee communication when performing cross-cutting processes (well, communism, the right word), which ultimately enhances the company's sustainability in fierce competition.
By the way, we have vacancies in the BPM department:
Abbreviations:
| ARIS | Architecture of Integrated Information Systems, (Integrated Information Systems Architecture) |
| BPMN | Business Process Model and Notation, (notation and business process model) |
| BPMS | Business Process Management System, (business process management system) |
| BS | Business Studio (program) |
| CAD / CAM / CAE | Computer-aided design (computer design support) Computer-aided manufacturing (computer manufacturing support) Computer-aided engineering (computer support for engineering calculations) |
| CATIA | Computer aided three-dimensional interactive application (computerized three-dimensional interactive application - CAD) |
| CRM | Customer Relationship Management (customer relationship management system) |
| Dfd | Data Flow Diagramming (data flow description) |
| eEPC | Extended event-driven process chain |
| ERP | Enterprise Resource Planning |
| IDEF | Integration Definition for Function Modeling (graphical modeling notation) |
| PDM | Product Data Management (product data management system) |
| PLM | Product Lifecycle Management (product data management throughout its life cycle) |
| CAD | CAD system |
| SED | Electronic document management system |
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/349520/
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