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Making your best better
07 March 2010 By Adrian Weckler
BPM systems must work alongside the various other applications and software that are running your business, drawing data in from disparate sources, in order to help make the most informed and appropriate management decisions.
These complementary systems can include the company's own enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, its document management and business intelligence (BI) applications, as well as other applications and software belonging to your clients or customers.
BPM systems harvested the information from other various sources to help management make decisions that improved performance, said Dermot McCauley, director of corporate development at Singularity.
"The critical difference is that BPM is very focused on performance improvement," said McCauley. "It provides a unifying context for other systems. BI and document management play a role in the BPM context by providing data, intelligence and document support, but BPM employs all those resources to improve performance, not just monitor it."
The most valuable information for use in BPM can often reside in an organisation's ERP and CRM applications.
Frank Buytendijk, vice-president and fellow of enterprise performance management at Oracle, said BPM's management and strategic strengths could be used to direct individual staff members 'workflows.
"The dominant path at the moment in BPM is integration with ERP and CRM systems," said Buytendijk. "Then BPM becomes not only about management processes and information, it becomes away of improving operations on the work floor, making staff smarter and giving people more insight.
"The current ERP versions offer a dashboard which give individuals an overview of their work, so they know which is the best thing to do now."
Running multiple systems with different sources and types of information can be challenging for organisations to manage. Patricia Stack, business analytics leader with IBM Global Business Services, said that getting the data management processes right was key to a successful BPM implementation.
"Companies often have local, independent and disconnected processes and are unable to get a complete view of the organisation's performance," she said. "There is often no common definitions of data, the data is poor quality and reporting can be based on historical data, which may be out of date by the time it is used. If companies are to realise the full value of any investment, they need to address their data governance and data management processes before embarking on a BPM implementation."
The next step for using BPM with other systems was to integrate it with suppliers' and customers' systems, to provide greater overview and management of complete supply chains or distinct processes, Buytendijk said.
"You can make scorecards available to your customers or your suppliers," he said. "Businesses are outsourcing more, and have more and more value chain integration.
"As businesses become closer to their customers and their suppliers, they need to invest in value chain integration more - and that is what EPM does.
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