The Process of business is as important as substance of business

The experience in the U.S. shows many companies learned (in some cases the hard way) that the way they conduct business is as important as the substance of the business. During much of the post-World War II period, American business expanded in size and scale without much regard to business processes. However, as world markets became more competitive in the 1970s and 1980s, American enterprises began taking the conduct of its work more seriously.

W. Edwards Deming, perhaps the leading quality guru of that period (The Los Angeles Times rated Deming one of the 50 people who most influenced business in the 20th century; ), taught the use of statistics to measure and improve business processes, in what he called continuous process improvement. Deming also advocated changing the relationship at the time between suppliers and customers, bringing the enterprises closer together to coordinate their activities. Before Deming's ideas took hold, for example, many manufacturers routinely competed for suppliers of raw materials on price alone, without looking at the longer-term implications on quality, or considering critical factors such as shipping. Many of the basic concepts of supply chain integration began with Deming.

The Six Sigma process quality movement pioneered by Motorola & GE showed that the key to dramatically increasing quality, meeting customer needs, and improving profitability is to improve business processes, not just tinker with the features of the product or service.

Most process improvements, as Deming noted, take place incrementally, thus companies need a culture, including an IT architecture, that encourages continuous process improvement. When organizations find new ways of working together -- and those relationships can differ sharply from established practice -- they need to have an e-business architecture that can adjust quickly to these new relationships. Business Process Management systems -  incorporating Web services are well positioned to provide this kind of support.

The key elements of Business Process Management systems include:

• A focus on business processes
• Workflows that incorporate information and processing by both people, automated systems and legacy applications
• A modeling paradigm for designing the workflows
• Rule-based programming, rather than explicit coding enabling business rules to be modified in quickly and easily (hand-coding in a variety of languages is usually available if required, but is typically kept to a minimum)
• Integration with many legacy systems, such as databases, Message Oriented Middleware (MOM), EPR and CRM systems, etc
• Powerful process management tools to measure and monitor each business process so that problems/bottlenecks can be quickly identified and improvements implemented

These attributes all work together to enable an organization to develop complete applications an order of magnitude faster and more reliably than they have ever been able to in the past, monitor and analyse them, tune and modify them.

The organization that embraces BPM truly becomes an Agile Enterprise, able to quickly react to changing market conditions, and take advantages of new opportunities. IT supports rather than hinders the ability of the organization to move quickly.

Studies have shown that the ROI on BPM projects has been fantastic, with clients reporting initial ROIs in the range of 100% to 300% and payback timeframes of 6 to 12 months. This is because successful BPM projects are not technology decisions, they are business decisions. Business buyers rave about the ROI and often report 10-times ROI than their counterparts that buy BPM like it was an operating system or some other mundane infrastructure technology.

BPM needs to be a major concern for senior management, IT strategists, operations management and business model innovators. Too often BPM is been promoted as a technology discipline, but because it represents a convergence of technology and business models, BPM needs to be on the agenda of all senior management.