What is Business Process Management?
Life cycle Of Business Process Management in construction industry.
Types of business process management
What is Business Process Management System?
Benefits of implementing a good BPMS.
How is it used in construction?
What is Business Process Management?
Business process management (BPM) is a methodology for identifying core business processes and improving them.
The goal of implementing BPM id to streamline the processes and make them more efficient.
Implementing BPM helps in creating value for customers and the business.
It is a dynamic and continual process involving reiterating and redesigning processes.
According to the ABPMP (Association of Business Process Management Professionals) Guide to The Business Process Management Common Body Of Knowledge (BPM CBOK)®, “Business Process Management (BPM) is a disciplined approach to identify, design, execute, document, measure, monitor, and control both automated and non-automated business processes to achieve consistent, targeted results aligned with an organization’s strategic goals. BPM involves the deliberate, collaborative, and increasingly technology-aided definition, improvement, innovation, and management of end-to-end business processes that drive business results, create value, and enable an organization to meet its business objectives with more agility. BPM enables an enterprise to align its business processes to its business strategy, leading to effective overall company performance through improvements of specific work activities either within a specific department, across the enterprise, or between organizations.”
The life cycle of Business Process Management in the construction industry
There are various steps involved in implementing BPM. Different experts have different opinions on how many of those are there.
However, despite the difference in opinion in number and naming, largely the following steps are involved:
- Design: It involves analyzing business processes and designing processes that are aligned with organizational goals.
- Model: It involves taking the data and analyzing and simulating new processes by adding or eliminating tasks involved and determining the most efficient methods. Various methods like what-if analysis can be employed for the purpose and it often involves the use of BPM software.
- Execute: It involves implementing the process, which could be done manually or automatically or in a combination.
- Monitor– As is evident it involves monitoring the processes and testing them for discrepancies.
- Optimize– The information gathered is used to optimize the processes and make improvements to accomplish strategic goals.
Why is it important?
Every activity that a business does can be broken down into processes. The processes when executed result in the creation of tangible or intangible value for the business and its clients.
Companies that implement Business process Management have a significantly higher success rate versus those that don’t.
Some of the primary benefits of implementing BPM include
- The efficient operation of business results is less wastage, reduction in errors, time savings, and as a result better services and products.
- Optimization of business operations
- Close monitoring of individual items that can result in operational efficiency.
- Customer Satisfaction –Efficient processes aid in delivering better services and better products overall, which directly results in customer satisfaction. For example, various construction processes that are inefficient can be optimized and improved, resulting in cost reduction and profit maximization.
There are three types of business process management:
Integration-Centric BPM:
This type of business process management system handles without much human involvement.
Human-Centric BPM:
Human-centric BPM deals with those processes that are primarily executed by humans.
Document-Centric BPM:
This type is often used by businesses that rely heavily on documentation like law firms, engineering and construction firms, etc.
You must carefully weigh the costs and benefits of implementing a BPMS in your organization.
However, the benefits that a BPMS can offer can outweigh the costs involved and yield a good long term return.
What is Business Process Management System?
Business Process Management System or BPMS is a collection of software used to identify existing business processes, organize them, analyze them and identify the inefficiencies and redundancies.
The data is then used to optimize business processes by eliminating redundancies and by using other techniques.
The processes are then automated so that the rate of errors can be reduced and resources are dedicated to other important processes.
The coordination between IT and non-IT staff is often required to successfully implement a BPMS.
In addition, BPMS is best for ongoing improvements and since business process management is dynamic, it is designed for continual improvement of the processes rather than a one-time event.
In order to help organizations implement BPM, a whole new market of Software and online tools has emerged. Companies use BPMS as a tool to implement BPM. It is used to automate business processes to increase efficiency and reduce costs.
There are many vendors like IBM and Oracle offering dozens of BPM software options on the market.
Benefits offered by a good BPMS:
- Increased efficiency by automation of repetitive tasks.
- Improved quality by simplifying processes, avoiding manual errors that can drive down expenses.
- Processes can be measured and resource wastage can be eliminated or reduced.
- Increased productivity, since processes are optimized, resources can be used on important things instead of redundant activities. This increases the productivity of equipment and employees.
- A good BPMS can help in agile project management and document processing,
- Contractors and construction companies can manage their HR-related processes and documentation efficiently. These are often very time consuming and rely heavily on paperwork.
- It can help the correspondence management process.
- A good BPMS can help in achieving an important goal of Business Process Management i.e. improving safety, security, and compliance.
How can it be used in the construction industry?
The construction companies operate in a complex and competitive environment. The construction industry sector is a strategically important sector that involves building infrastructure and buildings on which most other sectors of the economy depend.
The importance of the construction industry has been increasing in the last years, particularly in developing countries. Globalization, technological advancement are some of the major factors responsible.
Due to intense competition in the sector, managers are regularly looking out for strategies and tools to improve the efficiency of their businesses.
A construction company can have a lot of work processes, which are dynamic and complicated in nature. It is, therefore, important to implement a BPMS to identify the processes and optimize them for efficiency.
Business process Management can greatly help construction companies in optimizing various business processes such as
- Planning and coordinating projects– The success of any project and largely depends on the soundness of the plan and the efficient coordination of resources. By using a BPMS, project planning becomes easier and resources can be allocated to meaningful purposes
- Preparing budget– Budgeting is one of the main activities. It can help in effective analysis of budgets and in price quotations. Accurate budgeting can be done using the data gathered from a good BPMS.
- Procurement of materials and services – It is exceedingly important to have a good procurement plan and a god BPMS can be an invaluable tool for making timely procurement decisions.
- Execution of construction – The execution can be optimized by using a good BPMS by regularly monitoring processes involved in execution.
- Management of subcontracts – Improper management of sub-contractors is one of the major reasons for cost overruns in construction projects and employing a Good BPMS can be of immense help.
- Environment and work safety – Using a BPMS, the process that plays a role in the environment and safety can be identified and optimized for eliminating accidents due to bad practices.
- It can help companies to identify their processes and establish best practices.
- It can help in saving the cost of management and increasing overall efficiency.
Conclusion:
To conclude, Business process management is an important part of construction management, that allows companies in general and construction personnel, in particular, to execute the projects efficiently.
Implementing good Business Process Management Systems like Integration centric, human-centric and Document centric in the business can directly help in streamlining the processes, thereby minimizing wastage and increasing profits.
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