How can the owner of a company identify improvement points, raise profit? How can one reduce time to market? Identify low productivity professionals or detect advanced frauds? How to know if the product will be delivered exactly as planned? Is it possible to guarantee that everyone follows the same steps to deliver the correct product every time?
Back in 1980, first signs of Business Process Management (BPM) appears: one of the Ford teams formed by 500 workers had to achieve the desired production goals. After this team processes were identified, reviewed and improved, the same production could be achieved with only 120 workers on the team. What did BPM provide, you may ask: a method to track in a horizontal form, key tasks of the organization departments. Based on the execution analysis, metrics are collected in order to provide support to bottlenecks extinction.
This management discipline spread all over the world effectively allowing the discovery, modeling, analysis, measurement, improvement, and optimization of corporation BPM lifecycle can help to identify processes which can be improved; it will be modeled, designed and executed. Then, it will be monitored and based on the execution metrics BPM Lifecycle (Key Performance Indicators – KPI), it can be improved. This cycle can be repeated as many times as needed.
In 2007, an organization responsible for providing technology standards, Organization Management Group (OMG), officially adopted Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN) specification.
According to their website https://www.omg.org/bpmn/index.htm, BPMN specification objective is clear: “The primary goal of BPMN is to provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts that create the initial drafts of the processes, to the technical developers responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes, and finally, to the business people who will manage and monitor those processes.
Thus, BPMN creates a standardized bridge for the gap between the business process design and process implementation.”
Besides BPMN specification which allows drawing and executing pre-defined processes, different ways of representing unpredictable flows and complex rules like Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) and Decision Model Notation (DMN) respectively, started to be embraced by business area.
DMN was adopted in 2015 by OMG. Later, in 2016, Case Management Model and Notation Specification (CMMN) was also adopted by them. The official webpage from this organization holds detailed information about all these specifications: https://www.omg.org/.
The business team found many ways, not directly related to technology, to map and increase company performance. What would be the next step towards digital transformation? – Ally BPM and Technology, and enjoy the journey.
This blog post is part of the first section of the jBPM Getting started series: Welcome to a Business Automation era.
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