Business Process Management

In the new era of business transformation, an increasing number of enterprises are looking at re-orienting themselves into a process-centric customer-focused organization. This paradigm shift has led to the evolution of Business Process Management (BPM) as a principal management discipline to enable strategic planning of business goals, driving process improvements and innovative application of technology for greater agility.

However, BPM systems are no “silver bullet”; also, it is not just about the process. The core BPM philosophy dwells on the synergistic balance between people, processes and technology to drive improvements, maximize value and enhance business performance through cost reduction, increase in productivity, and better adherence to regulatory & compliance norms. It is slowly becoming transformative and universal in its appeal.

ERP Global, through its dedicated BPM Center of Excellence (CoE), brings together the right mix of functional expertise, best practices, frameworks, methodologies, and product expertise to provide end-to-end BPM services and solutions to its customers. ERP Global has pioneered in partnering with its customers to develop a well-defined BPM strategy & roadmap that is in alignment with core business objectives.

We understand that delivering superior results requires excellent knowledge of cutting edge technologies, processes and functions all the time. Our BPM CoE operates on a unique model, to continuously research areas relevant to the BPM practice. Our methodologies are based on a sound understanding of an organization’s Business Process Management needs, maturity and their readiness for BPM adoption. We have collaborative teams to bring in a good mix of domain, process and technical knowledge and ensure seamless implementations. Our thought leadership and consulting capabilities ensure innovative approaches to drive BPM adoption in myriad organizational landscapes.

ERP Global has proven experience in the BPM space. With its dedicated BPM CoE it helps organizations to mature to a process-driven business by:

• Streamlining and re-engineering existing business processes
• Providing greater visibility into process performance
• Promoting collaboration among different business units & process stakeholders.

ERP Global has formed alliances with leading BPM product vendors to support a wider range of implementation platforms suited to a customer’s preferred technology stack.

Competent Resource Pool and Knowledge Management

Our resources possess a strong mix of business, analytical and information technology skills that enable us to carry out an organization’s BPM mandate effectively. It is our on-going endeavor to harness these skills and bring in experts as necessary for on-the-job training of our CoE personnel. The CoE conducts internal workshops and periodic brainstorming sessions to keep updated with the developments in the BPM space and utilizes a comprehensive set of industry-specific process templates and best practice documents.

Business Process Management Solution Approach

ERP Global’s BPM Solution approach is a closed-loop iterative process, as depicted in the schematic.

Discovery

An organization is an intricate system of inter-connected processes. Our business analysts work with the process owners during the process discovery phase to identify the relevant processes and their integration needs, process hierarchies and other process attributes. The understanding of the process topology thus obtained will provide the necessary information to go ahead with the modeling phase.

Modeling

The modeling phase imparts the visual rendition to the process discovery phase. ERP Global business analysts and process consultants working with the customers to model business processes that span internal and external users and applications within the organization enables a clear definition of the business process, including the critical touch points across people and disparate application silos and associated business rules. The modeling phase also includes running simulations to identify process bottle-necks, analyze cycle-time in a probabilistic way.

Deployment

Equipped with the process blueprint and the primary business rules, our BPM specialists transform the blueprint into an execution model using the appropriate BPM technology / components. This involves process abstraction from the underlying applications into the process management layer and decoupling the process-centric rules into the rules-engine of the BPM tools. This is a carefully thought of decision to determine what stays within the application and what encompasses the process to deliver a single-user experience and optimal business process execution.

Monitoring

When a BPM solution has been deployed the end-users begin using the new process and participate in it as per the process definition to perform reviews, approvals and execute the tasks assigned to them. All the processes are uniformly monitored using dashboards and reports for any exceptions or bottlenecks encountered, or any discrepancies with the defined activities. These analytics could feed further process changes.

Optimization

The KPIs and other process metrics are used as a basis to drive further optimization to the process and continuously improve the performance to better align to business goals. This solution approach is complemented by our in-house ERP Global BPM Implementation Methodology that incorporates the use of our BPM frameworks and accelerators to expedite BPM adoption in consistent and uniform steps.

Business Process Management Value Proposition

We partner with our customers in developing robust BPM applications to help them become more responsive to changing market dynamics and gain higher competitive advantage.  We have a comprehensive set of frameworks, accelerators and service offerings that enable our customers to achieve:

• Faster time-to-market
• Improved operational efficiency and reduced cost by eliminating waste
• Increased revenues
• Improved customer retention levels with the help of effective business processes.

BPM Frameworks

BPM Assessment Framework
The BPM Assessment Framework uses a Process Maturity Modelto categorize an organization’s processes at four levels of maturity (Preliminary, Defined, Managed or Optimized) based on the traits exhibited by the process.

This framework uses a well-defined scientific methodology to peg an organization’s current and desired level of process maturity at one of the defined Process Maturity Stages. This helps in defining a road map for transformation to move from the As-Is to the To-Be stage of Process Maturity for People, Processes and Technology.

BPM ROI Analysis Framework

The ERP Global BPM ROI Analysis framework provides a structured approach to analyzing the costs and benefits of adopting BPM for a particular process. This framework also enables sensitivity analysis and can be used to support a business case for the BPM Implementation.

BPM Accelerators

Best Practice Reference Templates

ERP Global has developed best practice reference templates for the Retail Credit Card Operations, Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) based Manufacturing Supply Chain and IT Demand Management processes.

BPM Implementation Widgets

ERP Global has developed readymade implementation widgets for common process patterns such as review-approval cycles, job allocation, and escalation to greatly speed up the technical implementation of BPM Solutions.

A La CARTE – Composite Applications for the Real-Time Enterprise

ERP Global has pioneered a vendor agnostic composite application reference architecture aptly titled A La Carte. This reference architecture enables customers to configure their composite applications and benefit from agility and visibility through a best-of-breed approach without vendor lock-in.

The services landscape of ERP Global’s BPM CoE encompasses both Consulting and Implementation offerings as shown in the schematic below.

Consulting Offerings

Successful adoption of BPM entails thorough assessment of our customer’s people, systems & processes, process-level & enterprise-level improvement objectives, and the objectives of the BPM initiative.

Our consulting offerings include:

BPM Strategy & Roadmap

Every organization has its own unique processes that set itself apart from competition. Hence the BPM adoption cannot be the same across organizations. It is important to accurately assess the process landscape and the business needs to determine a strategy that best aligns to the business goals. As a part of ERP Global’s BPM strategy and roadmap offering we assess the current and desired levels of process maturity to set up guidelines and mechanisms to discover, prioritize, automate and optimize processes. Our BPM roadmap is based on a sound understanding of the organization. We also define a training, communication, and rollout plan for processes

BPM Product Evaluation

The Business Process Management (BPM) Suite market space is quite crowded with over 140 products claiming to offer full fledged BPM capabilities. However, these products exhibit differing levels of maturity on core BPM functionality such as a process modeling tool, process engine, workflow portal, rules engine, and integration adapters. The challenge lies in taking a holistic view of an organization’s process management needs and selecting the product that optimally meets these needs. In fact, choosing the right product is critical to the success of a BPM initiative.

Our BPM product evaluation offering helps our customers identify criteria for evaluation based on the organization’s process needs and weigh them according to priorities. This will enable short-listing the BPM suites on the identified criteria and come up with a final recommendation based on the evaluation.

Business Process Re-engineering

It is common knowledge that organizations are continuously looking at ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their existing business processes. As a part of Business Process Re-engineering offering we help customers:

• Model and simulate existing processes
• Create and run simulation scenarios to see impact of proposed optimization/ improvement in terms of cost, resources, bottlenecks and cycle time
• Validate proposed process change and recommend improvements.

Process Elaboration & Elicitation

The augmented life-cycle of a business process suggests that the most important constituent that drives BPM success is the understanding of the current process and the synthesis of that understand to suggest improvements or inject optimization. ERP Global’s process elaboration and elicitation is aimed at effectively documenting the organization’s business processes using modeling tools and standards to come up with reference process templates that would act as a baseline for subsequent BPM implementations. The process elaboration and elicitation will provide businesses the capability to understand their internal business procedures in a graphical notation and will enable organizations to communicate these procedures in a consistent manner.

BPM Implementation Offerings

ERP Global will partner with you to quickly realize the benefits from your BPM initiative enabling you to steer clear of common pitfalls of BPM development. We bring a robust methodology, BPM implementation accelerators and a talented pool of process, domain & product experts to ensure that our customer’s BPM project is on-time and delivers to expectations.

Our BPM Implementation Services include:

Process-Centric Composite Applications Implementation
With the need for a more responsive and agile enterprise, there is increased focus on collaboration with partners, suppliers, customers. Today’s real-time enterprise needs a solution that would orchestrate people, process & technology powered by a best-practices and composite solution to leverage investment in existing assets. ERP Global’s process-centric composite applications implementation focuses on creating an implementation architecture that encompasses the portal, process, services and applications layer to deliver a solution compliant with SOA principles. The focus is on systematizing business logic and data sources from assorted primary applications to provide an efficient process layer that encapsulates the business process logic.

Integration-Centric BPM Implementation
ERP Global’s Integration-centric BPM implementations are solely focused on enabling the interactions between packaged applications, custom applications and external applications. These are typically used to automate system-centric processes. Integration between the applications and systems that support cross-functional business processes is the core of integration-centric BPM. The BPM implementation leverages ERP Global’s deep expertise on varying technologies to converge with the BPM toolset capabilities to deliver robust. ERP Global has developed various in-house integration frameworks depending on the integration need and the source and destination systems.

BPM Suite Implementation

BPM implementations call for different approaches, roles and expertise when compared to traditional application development. ERP Global service delivery platform consists of leading BPM players like:

• SAVVION
• Tibco
• BEA Aqualogic
• ORACLE SOA
• IBM WebSphere
• Global 360
• FileNet
• jBPM.

Our BPM suite implementation offering includes:

• Plan and schedule BPM Implementation
• Conduct process discovery and optimization workshops
• Document process specifications, requirements, rules, and KPIs
• Create user interfaces for human steps and integration for system steps as required
• Automate the business processes, KPIs and rules

Create dashboards and customize the workflow portal.