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BPM is a discipline combining software capabilities and business expertise to accelerate process improvement. BPM governs an organization’s cross-functional, core business processes. It achieves strategic business objectives by directing the deployment of resources from across the organization into efficient processes that create customer value. This focus on driving overall bottom line success by integrating verticals and optimizing core work (e.g. order-to-cash, integrated product development, integrated supply chain) differentiates BPM from traditional functional management disciplines. In addition, intrinsic to BPM is the principle of continuous improvement, perpetually increasing value generation and sustaining market competitiveness (or dominance) of the organization.
BPM enabled by SOA is BPM enhanced by a flexible IT architecture to simplify the creation and decomposition of services to facilitate business innovation.
Through more than 8 years of customer engagement experience with early BPM technologies, and over 2 years of experience with hundreds of customers designing and implementing BPM Enabled by SOA solutions, we’ve learned some key lessons.
To succeed at BPM, you have to understand what makes your company special, and identify the processes that support and define your uniqueness. To insure that the best process is selected for your BPM project, it’s important to have senior management sponsorship to establish a cross-enterprise team consisting of both LOB and IT in partnership.
Once you have the team, you need to select a process that will differentiate the business. Successful projects start with a painful and visible process that will yield the greatest return with allowable risk. Determining what this process is can be done in a number of ways. One option is utilizing the the BPM Engagement Framework. The framework utilizes an assessment questionnaire to determine a risk and strategy analysis. It will enable and organization to understand its level of adoption, and provide starting points utilizing the appropriate software and providing specific next steps.
You can also consider leveraging IBM Component Business Modeling Services to help you determine the critical business process to focus on, and to provide the justification from a strategic and financial perspective.
After selecting the process, you’ll need to model it to perform simulations to determine the most optimal business performance. These simulations will show the impact of process changes to the business. Predicting business outcomes can help justify resource investments based on the best projected ROI.
The IBM WebSphere Business Modeler is a business analyst tool which is used to define, model, simulate, and improve on business processes. This tool helps business analysts define and optimize their processes, while justifying process changes through return on investment (ROI) calculations. It is an open standards-oriented product, operating on the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE). WebSphere Business Modeler products can drive more granular business insight and knowledge by thoroughly and visually defining those business tasks which are critical to your firm’s ongoing success.
SOA dramatically reduces process time, maintenance and deployment costs for BPM projects. It does this by enabling you to leverage existing as well as new services, and to implement pre-built industry business models. For a faster time to market, you can utilize the IBM SOA Business Catalog, a comprehensive, online resource of IBM and IBM Business Partner SOA assets validated for enablement onto IBM’s SOA Foundation products. To enable governance of the services in use within your company, and to encourage service reuse, enhance connectivity, and optimize service performance, IBM offers the IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository.
Once you’ve optimized your core business processes, you’ll need to deploy them on a dynamic, flexible process engine. IBM WebSphere Process Server executes mission critical processes securely, consistently, and with transactional integrity.
69% of CFOs say that measuring and monitoring business process and performance is their top priority. Achieving real-time visibility into processes can feed an ongoing, iterative loop of improvement and optimization. The IBM WebSphere Business Monitor enables you to monitor the applications that are critical to your business. WebSphere Business Monitor V6.02 now has Business Activity Monitoring capability, with an increased scope of activities and applications that can be monitored. By using WebSphere Business Monitor and WebSphere Business Modeler together, you can feed your real data back into the modeling tool for real life situations.
IBM also offers the IBM Workplace Dashboard Framework to deliver improved decision making by leveraging data from diverse business systems in real time. These dashboards can be tailored based on a user’s role, and they allow the user to take action through integrated collaboration capabilities.
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