Over the last 8 blog postings, I have discussed how implementing a Process Oriented Architecture (POA) for Business Process Management (BPM) initiatives provides organizations with the agility needed to incrementally build out business processes. Companies can make improvements over time as the business is able to digest change. Yet the organization can leverage every process automation investment because the architectural structure binds them together to work as a whole. In this last entry in the series, I will summarize how BPM – using POA – can yield excellent savings for companies in any industry. Implementing BPM without POA strategy can save companies money by improving operational efficiencies within the organization. Using POA, companies attain further savings by the way BPM is implemented.
POA allows businesses to realize immediate gains from BPM while putting the company in a position to evolve and expand these processes consistently and continuously within and across an organization. Businesses look to IT to increase productivity through automated systems and also expect IT to find ways to reduce the cost to implement these systems. Implementing a POA for BPM saves companies money by reusing common process designs for different departments.
POA can be an enabler for many BPM implementations. The basic process is the same, but can be customized to the specific needs of departments and individuals while providing the means to scale BPM across the organization inexpensively. Without the right architecture, an organization would have BPM in silos; separate, vertical divisions with no connection, in which case BPM may prove to be cost-prohibitive.
BPM often starts within a department – such as Procurement or Legal where human error can cause critical delays. As organizations dive into any single process to automate it, they find that it spans across departments or communities. Automated tasks such as order entry and document approval cut across most industries. However, these applications only improve productivity for “local” or single-department business problems. The productivity for the given task was greatly improved, but it didn't solve company-wide business problems such as: Did the order make it to fulfillment? Did the offer letter get processed properly by HR? Did the final report get assembled and submitted on time with proper management oversight and control?
Gaining real productivity improvements and cost savings comes from having local processes working efficiently, and having a connection between each of the local processes. BPM and POA connect all of the vertical departments together, giving C-level executives the ability to review the entire organization to see where the bottlenecks are, where inefficiencies exist and what the cost drivers might be.
A key to saving money is how the BPM system itself is planned and architected. Decoupling the views and back-end systems from the business process itself utilizes reusability. In BPM system architecture, reusability means that the basic process can be customized for different communities or departments in an organization.
POA organizes the process, views and the calls to the back-end systems by tightly or loosely coupling these objects as it make sense for the business. Once these components are organized in this way, current and future needs of top-level management, individual contributors and communities of users can be accounted for. The design or implementation of this POA will yield the most optimally efficient system possible because it anticipates business change. By finding commonality where it makes sense and structuring the design logically, POA can achieve what has been done for business applications (using SOA) in the realm of BPM.