With ever-increasing pressure of competition coupled by the recent global economic slump, Outsourcing and Automating of Business Processes has become a kind of necessity for enterprise owners. Although Outsourcing of business process results in cost saving, quality of process outcome remains questionable many a time. The Quality of Business Process outcome is directly related to how the process is being understood, optimized, and executed by its stakeholders. This is exactly where the usability of Business Process Management (BPM) comes in and can help both – Organizations and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) – units.

In our earlier blog, ‘BPM as a Business Enabler’, we have already discussed about People, Process, System and Technology framework for BPM. Here we shall elucidate on how BPM and BPO can work in unison.

Effective communication and collaboration among BPO process owners and their counterparts is the initial step in understanding how the process work. BPM can accomplish this task efficiently through its Process Modeler functionality. Krawler jSonic BPM offers a unique Process Modeler, which is a web-based process designing and modeling tool that uses standard Business Process Modeling Notifications (BPMN). Furthermore, it eliminates the need of technical coding enabling the stakeholders to easily understand the process working mechanism.

Through BPM, an organization that wants to outsource their business process can be benefited in innumerable ways. BPM enables process owners to define (diagrammatically) and optimize the business process operating in the organization. Once that is done, they are assured about quality in process outcome. The outsourcing of such modeled process can yield in cost saving. Furthermore, with BPM in place, changes in the process can easily be accomplished through Business Rules Engine. In addition, when the contract with BPO agency expires, the process can again be easily implemented in organization’s BPM environment or can be re-outsourced.

From the perspective of BPO industry, BPM reduces the time period to understand the client’s process. It further enables stakeholders in BPO to clearly analyze an individual task in the concerned process, and formulate their strategy (in accordance with industry best practices) to achieve the process objective. This results in saving of time, resource, and cost while carrying out the process.

To conclude, BPM enables BPO owners to demonstrate that they have clear understanding of client’s process and client can be assured of both  ‘cost saving and quality’ related to the process outsourced.

In a true sense, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an approach for enhancing customer experience and satisfaction by serving their needs and requirements in the most efficient way. In achieving this objective, the importance of external (customer facing) and internal (cross functional) processes can hardly be overlooked. This is exactly the junction where significance of Business Process Management (BPM) is realized. In other words, the convergence of BPM and CRM results into a Process Driven CRM.

One of the most noticeable benefits that BPM offers is the capability of facing any dynamic business condition. This is enabled through efficient handling of process, right from designing phase to execution. Krawler jSonic BPM offers comprehensive capabilities for process management, workflow automation, collaboration, data management and reporting.

Most of the time, the processes managed and automated by BPM are cross-functional i.e. the processes are spread across various business domain of enterprise.  When this ability to efficiently handle the business process is incorporated in CRM, the effectiveness of CRM is increased many fold.

Consider the situation where a customer places a bulk order enquiry to the customer representative. In order to answer the customer query, information from inventory, quality and manufacturing division is required.  The CRM solution that doesn’t have a process centric approach is of no value in such scenario.

BPM enables CRM to collate the information and metrics across the enterprise that results in better customer service.

Workflow automation is another area where CRM can be benefited by incorporating BPM. The workflow engine in BPM enables stakeholders to define the automatic routing of tasks related to customer processes. Although in CRM, the Case Escalation functionality supports workflow automation, it is limited to CRM domain only. With BPM, tasks can be automatically routed among other enterprise domain such as inventory, whenever required.

In conclusion, CRM is all about acquiring, managing and serving customers. This can be done efficiently and effectively only by having a strong enterprise wide process framework that is delivered by BPM.

The ever changing market conditions across the world have forced organizations to rethink the way they carry out business. Organizations are focusing on optimizing and managing operational cost, improving customer service delivery, adopting strategy (IT & Non-IT) for flexibility and much more.

For businesses to be successful, a comprehensive framework involving People, Process, System and Technology (popularly known as PPST framework) plays a critical role. Let us briefly visit these four components.

• People refers to management, employees, vendors and customers. The People component is the most critical and decisive factor that determines the state of business.

• Process refers to the way in which various business activities are carried out. A well defined process framework guarantees success, consistently.

• System refers to various enterprise applications such as ERP, CRM, SCM and PLM, among others. These enterprise applications are generally tightly integrated with their respective domains. For example, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is only attached with marketing, sales and customer service.

• Technology refers to platform (UNIX, Windows) and architecture (n-tier, client server) on which the enterprise applications are employed.  Integration and communication issues between various enterprise applications are encountered due to heterogeneous platform and architecture.

So the question arises now is – Do we have a software system that incorporates the PPST framework?

I firmly believe that Business Process Management provides capabilities for effectively and efficiently managing people, process, system and technology.

Krawler offers a unique Business Process Management solution – jSonic BPM. It offers functionalities such as Process Management, Workflow Automation, Collaboration, Reporting, Data Management and Web Services that incorporates people, process, system and technology aspects. Some of the major functional capabilities of jSonic BPM are:

• Design, model, execute, automate and optimize the cross-functional business processes.
• Manage Process users at each process activity
• Add value to the existing enterprise applications
• Integrate with heterogeneous platform and architecture through an SOA framework
• Provides Collaboration features such as Document Management
• Web Services based for communicating with any web enabled device

The next question that arises now – What are the key Business Process Management offerings?

The main BPM offering can be summarized as:

• Holistic View of Business
• Understanding about the most fundamental component of business operations – Business Process
• Leverages on existing enterprise applications
• Effective communication between stakeholders
• Flexibility and adaptability to face any dynamic business conditions

In a nutshell, Business Process Management offers a comprehensive solution for managing enterprise operations through management of business processes.  BPM provides a complete solution for cross functional business process management that involves people, system and technology aspects.

BPM, in the true sense, acts as a business enabler by empowering organizations to handle any business opportunity or threat effectively.