Business process management as applied in industry

A supply chain is an interconnected set of business procedures and business partners that manages the flow of goods and information from the point of design to the delivery of the product and/or service to the end customer. The supply chain provides a well-coordinated channel to organizations for delivering their products and services to the end customer. Supply chain typical include the following:

A few processes to name in the supply chain domain are as follows:

Order management is a core process in the supply chain domain. The process depicted in the next figure is a trivial process but is intended to exemplify the ease and clarity that a business process brings to the table, particularly to a cross-functional business process. From the process diagram itself, any layman can understand the cross-functional units in the organization and, of course, the flow. Thus, the users, both business analysts and operations users, can understand the bigger picture more easily, thereby improving the overall communication and efficiency.

Payment is an activity but has the size and complexity of a separate process. Further, if we apply the rule of responsibility, a payment needs to be clearly abstracted as a separate process that can be reused across the processes of the organization for processing a payment. Thus, we can take a design decision of making payment a sub-process that reduces complexity, enables better handling of exceptional situations, and enables reusability.

Another point I want you to notice in this particular process is the Stop event in No Stock; a message is embedded in the termination of the process. This can be used as a signal to another organization process for handling No Stock situations; for example, in this case, No Stock would be the signal event to trigger a demand management process.

Banking is another domain where BPMs are heavily applied. BPM enables banks to automate their business process such as account opening, loan processing, payments, and transactions. Visibility of processes and compliance to regulations are critical in the banking domain. Banks continuously make innovative changes in their processes and services, and BPMS provides them with the capability to adapt to process improvement initiatives rapidly.

The typical business processes associated with banking are as follows:

The preceding figure shows a simplified version of loan processing, similar to the supply chain management domain sample process. The clarity it brings in is obvious. However, in the banking domain, the more important aspects are the flexibility, automation, and intelligence options that BPM puts before the business users. The business users can define processes and modify them, thus bringing agility for market promotions; automation helps users to successfully comply with regulatory compliance; and activity monitoring-based analytics help banking organizations to reduce fraud and enhance customer experience.