What is Business Process Management
Business Process Management or BPM tools are software that helps organisations manage, execute and analyse processes.
Organisations have become increasingly complex with more and more applications and departments involved in fulfilling a process. Even if you don’t have a BPM solution, you are currently fulfilling these processes. A piece of work comes in – might be through email, or a paper application or a new piece of work appears on a work queue for the application that manages that work. If you have a colleague or team who completes that workpiece of work from end to end – then you might wonder what value a BPM tool can bring.
But today, it’s more and more common that multiple people from multiple teams will need to complete that work. They’ll use multiple systems and many interacts with the customer across multiple channels. And this is where a good BPM tool earns its place in your organisation.
Put simply, a robust BPM solution will help you with your:
CASE MANAGEMENT
WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT
SYSTEM INTEGRATION
CHANNEL INTEGRATION
Many organisations are using old technology to try and manage this, often using a suite of tools to cobble together a single solution. But there is a better way.
What do we mean by Case Management?
Customer requirements can often have a complex fulfilment process in order to provide that service. Let’s look at Bereavement in Financial Services as an example.
A Customer’s relative calls into customer services to advise that a loved one has sadly passed away. They’ll pass that request onto a dedicated Bereavement team who’ll handle the request. They’ll send out forms and paperwork (usually by post) and update the account(s) so that other staff members will know what’s happening.
Product team(s) will separately get requests sent over to them asking them to close down the accounts held, calculate interest, provide final balances and statements. This will happen for each and every product held, so it might be a separate team for Current Accounts, Credit Cards, Mortgages, Savings Accounts etc… these tend to be different teams because these products are managed on different applications.
Meanwhile, the mailroom will receive a mail-back from the relative, perhaps a copy of a death certificate and probate notifications.
Legal teams may need to be involved in their holdings are complex and significant, or if there is an issue with Probate.
Debt Management will likely be involved if there is a credit balance to any product such as a personal loan, credit card or mortgage (or all three).
The relatives call up to find out what’s happening and despite their best efforts, the Bereavement team simply aren’t able to clearly, quickly and easily tell them what is happening. They are probably waiting for all the other departments to get back to them. That’s the challenge that companies face when dealing with complex processes.
This is what we’re talking about when we say Case Management.
With a well-implemented BPM tool like Pega or Appian you’d be able to see at a glance, what stage an individual Bereavement case is in. You’d be able to understand things like:
- Who is working on it?
- What are they doing?
- When should they be complete by?
- What outstanding actions are still required?
- What information are we waiting from the customers representative?
Zooming out – you’d be able to report on the status of all Bereavement cases. How many cases are in which stages? Are there delays or bottlenecks? How much outstanding work is in the queue(s) and what is the resourcing effort required to fulfil these?
Case Management is one of the most powerful features of a good Business Management Process system being implemented.
Debt Management will likely be involved if there is a credit balance to any product such as a personal loan, credit card or mortgage (or all three).
The relatives call up to find out what’s happening and despite their best efforts, the Bereavement team simply aren’t able to clearly, quickly and easily tell them what is happening. They are probably waiting for all the other departments to get back to them. That’s the challenge that companies face when dealing with complex processes.
This is what we’re talking about when we say Case Management.
With a well implemented BPM tool like Pega or Appian you’d be able to see at a glance, what stage an individual Bereavement case is in. You’d be able to understand things like:
- Who is working on it?
- What are they doing?
- When should they be complete by?
- What outstanding actions are still required?
- What information are we waiting from the customers representative?
Zooming out – you’d be able to report on the status of all Bereavement cases. How many cases are in which stages? Are there delays or bottlenecks? How much outstanding work is in the queue(s) and what is the resourcing effort required to fulfil these?
Case Management is one of the most powerful features of a good Business Management Process system being implemented.
What do we mean by Workflow Management?
Workflow Management is responsible for how a piece of work (or process) moves through your organisation in order to be fulfilled correctly.
If your processes are completed end to end by a single person, then you probably don’t know what all the fuss is about. However, that scenario is increasingly unlikely, particularly in larger organisations. So you need an effective and efficient way of passing work to different teams/people.
So how do you do that today? Does the system automatically push it to the next team? What if their work is on a different system… Do you email them and ask them to do something? Maybe a central inbox?
Take our [simplified] recruitment example shown here. Could you tell at a glance where a candidate was in the workflow? Could you say how many cases were in each stage of the process? Are you certain that if Dave from IT is sick, that someone else will pick up your request for logical access? Or will it just sit in Dave’s inbox until he comes back to work?
This is where Business Process Management or BPM tools can add huge amounts of value.
System Integration
System integration (or SI) is probably one of the most expensive aspects of IT for large organisations. It’s just so expensive and complicated and time-consuming to integrate System A with System B. In fact, the only thing more expensive than SI is building yourself a brand new system.
You may have heard of the term API. Does API stand for Application Programming Interface – catchy, no…?
Without going into too much detail, an API is a standardised way of communicating from one system to another. It’s what allows information to be sent from one system to another in a way they both understand. You use software that is powered by API’s every day.
For instance, every single comparison website uses API’s. Went to booking.com to look for a hotel? You used an API. Went to kayak.com to search for flights? You used an API.
BPM tools allow you to integrate API’s quickly and effectively – if you have them. If you don’t have an API, you can automate the transfer of information using tools like RPA (click here to learn more about RPA).
Pega and Appian BPM software are the market leaders. Because of their size and scale, hundreds of companies and worked with these platforms to create API’s – plugins that remove the need to integrate applications. For instance, both applications offer an API plugin for DocuSign, meaning you could quickly and easily integrate your existing DocuSign process into the BPM platform. There are literally hundreds of plug-in components available on both Pega and Appian’s marketplaces.
Channel Integration
Gone are the days when all your interactions with a customer happened in one place. Channel hopping is more prevalent than ever – and you need to be where your customers are. How do you manage the handoffs between In-Person, Phone, Email, Web, Social Media and App so that it feels like a single conversation for your customer?
For example:
- A customer messages your organisation on Twitter about a problem
- The organisation calls the customer to discuss
- The customer then emails to follow up on the issue
- The organisation sends a formal letter explaining what went wrong and what they are doing about it
- The customer calls into one of your retail offices to get a replacement
- The organisation calls to see how things are going
This type of multi-channel communication is a nightmare for organisations to manage – but it is evermore the reality we’re facing. And the marketplace is generating more methods of communication – not less.
How do the retail colleagues know what’s been happening in the back office? How do you keep a single view of this customers interactions when you have different software application managing each of them?