Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) consists of the methods and use of tools for identifying, understanding, modeling, designing and improving business processes. BPM involves monitoring and measuring business processes to identify process improvement opportunities, to design and test improvements. Optimization and increased utilization of automation to this end is a focal targets of process improvement.

Through the methodological application of BPM, organizations have the opportunity to standardize work practices, increase efficiency, identify and define roles, and monitor performance. Being able to easily locate process bottlenecks and inefficiencies and quickly act to remedy these problems, enables organizations to be responsive and agile in the face of rapid change. It enables them to provide the best service to their customers and to survive and thrive in the digital economy.

In essence, next4biz BPM offers a wholly unique approach to Business Process Management.

Particularly medium and large scale organizations make much use of workflow designs in order to meet customer needs as closely as possible. However as the extent and complexity of these workflows increases, their management becomes increasingly inefficient. This is where next4biz BPM excels by reducing the management burden through automating many aspects of process design/improvement, documentation, testing and (re)launching.

Prominent characteristics of next4biz BPM include the following:

• “No code” process design
• Transparent workflows allowing monitoring and analysis of all stages of processing
• Workload measurement at the departmental and individual levels
• Identification of process improvement targets and execution of process improvement
• Significant operational and support cost savings
• Single platform for the management of design, testing and production environments
• Access to all enterprise applications from a single access point through extensive integration capabilities

In addition, next4biz BPM has a user interface suitable for use on mobile devices, so field teams have data access wherever and whenever needed and, when necessary and with the necessary authorizations, can activate services to ensure uninterrupted execution of business processes.

Process digitalization involves transforming a business process that relies on physical files, offline stores, and manual execution into a largely automated process that utilizes online data storage and retrieval for actionable information. It is a transformation that all organizations wishing to move forward on the digital evolution curve must undergo.

To aid organizations get up to speed with process digitalization, Next4biz maintains the “Roadmap to Success” methodology, complementing the next4biz BPM application. It contains a wealth of methodological know-how and best business practices distilled by next4biz from hundreds of process designs spanning sectors and business models.

Using the process elements library within next4biz BPM shaped by nearly two decades of business experience, the design of process flows is simple and fast. To increase efficiency further, built-in process templates can be utilized and themselves be customized for reuse. It is also possible to export process definitions for external analysis and documentation.

Rapidly responding to changing customer requirements is crucial for organizations serving customers through digital channels. However, designing processes suitable for target customer groups is very resource and time intensive. next4biz BPM’s “drag-drop” style design interface outshines similar offerings, by the simplicity and speed of design which it makes possible.

All process design with next4biz BPM can be performed without coding and designs can be launched in to production without IT support. This ensures that process improvement are rapidly deployed and that the process improvement costs are minimal.

The advantages of next4biz BPM “no code” design tools may be categorized as follows:

• Easy design with drag-drop process flow diagramming
• Simple interface design including data fields and electronic forms and their association to process flows
• Role design and authorization
• SLA support for process flows
• Business rules to fully control all aspects of process such as conditional transitioning, assignment and authorizations
• Inter-process relationships triggered by user behavior as well as system events

To have optimized processes that provide the best customer experience is key for organizations to maintain and grow their customer the customer base. The challenge, is that this is a moving target. Customer requirements change, as do markets, competitors, regulations, economic conditions, products, environment and human resources. As a result, todays best designed process is tomorrow’s process in need of radical overhaul.

To keep-up process designs have to be continuously tweaked and sometimes totally re-thought. These new designs then need to be tested against desired outcomes and finally launched in to production for the cycle to be repeated. This cycle must be repeated for many processes simultaneously. Furthermore the design-test-launch cycle must be carried out on elements of business process.

With many legacy applications the design-test-launch cycle is carried out on different platforms, necessitating complex migration of data from one stage to the next and the maintenance of separate systems. It also typically involves technical support to execute. As a consequence, cycle times are lengthy and expensive, the cost of mistakes prohibitive and overall process improvement flexibility low. With next4biz BPM these inefficiencies are blown away. Design, testing and launching in to production are done within the same platform. The migration between stages is fully handled by Next4biz BPM and can be effected through a simple user interface. next4biz BPM simply has two environments for design and production maintained within one platform. Process flows, data fields, forms and other design elements can be created or modified without coding, through simple, easy to learn interfaces. What’s more, as the design is being carried out next4biz BPM builds the new version of the application on the fly, so testing can begin immediately without waiting for long builds to complete. Transition to production is easy too. Authorized users can perform the migration with the click of a mouse which completes in a matter of minutes. In the other direction, the as-is processes in production can be transferred in to the design environment for improvement with the same ease.

The simplicity and speed of this cycle means that the impact of changes can be measured immediately and fed back into the design process for further iterations.

Data loss is a high occurrence risk of managing processes across multiple applications and digital environments. Data residing in emails, spreadsheets, and local databases on multiple devices is prone to getting lost without being analyzed. In addition, extracting and querying data collated through traditional means, typically requires technical know-how such as the use of databases and coding which in turn necessitates technical training to perform process analysis.

next4biz BPM provides a simple route to eliminate these problems. Its simple integration facilities allow central management of all enterprise data. Reports and charts can be easily created using simple drag-and-drop style interfaces, providing valuable insights into the data. In this way process bottlenecks and inefficiencies can be swiftly identified, and performance measurement performed at the level of persons, departments, suppliers or any other organizational groupings.

Dashboards also play an essential role in BPM by facilitating process monitoring and oversight for authorized managers. Dashboards are as simple and easy to design as reports and charts. From dashboards managers can perform drill-down analysis to determine root-causes. In addition next4biz BPM can be integrated with enterprise reporting tools, and can export data in tabular form for external analysis.

Business processes must be efficient and responsive. To ensure this, they must be continuously reviewed and improved as customer requirements, markets, competitors, regulations, economic conditions, products, environment, and human resources change. This is a continuous process that has to be carried out rapidly to be successful. Failure means falling progressively further behind business objectives.

In other words, both the target business processes themselves and the process of their continuous improvement have the need for speed. This is achievable through business rules that facilitate the automation of most facets of process execution including process routing, event triggers, data authorizations, escalations and the calculation of derived data.

next4biz BPM provides easy-to-use interfaces for business rule design. It allows both drag-drop style rule design through the next4biz BPM Smart Rules design tool, and coded rule design with the next4biz BPM’s Easy Scripting environment. These facilities enable quick and easy modification of process behavior and addition of automated responses to processes. Code supporting business rules is generated and compiled automatically in the background without necessitating time consuming system shutdowns and restarts.

To increase the speed of designing business rules even further, next4biz BPM comes ready equipped with a large library of ready-made and documented business rules that can be directly applied or applied after customization. This library is the result of many years working with many different kinds of businesses from different sectors, distilled to meet most business rule requirements out-of-the box.

With next4biz BPM organizations gain full control over the routines executing business rules and unlimited freedom to develop processes that exactly match their requirements. As an example, web service calls can be triggered simply by determining the triggering event and timing. Similarly next4biz BPM can be set to listen to external applications and take automated actions based on predefined conditions being fulfilled.

Process flows define the sequencing of steps within a business process in order to attain the goals of that process. A process flow identifies the occurrence of activities, human and other resources and scheduling within a process.

Process flows may be structured or ad hoc. For predictability and manageability, it is desirable that the structure of a process flow be formally defined. Enterprise processes such as purchasing, sales, goods issue, invoicing, and personnel hiring fall into this category. Structured process flows are not always possible or feasible, especially for one-off processes where process flow has to be decided ad hoc during process execution.

Unlock the full potential of your B2B, B2C, and B2B2C business processes with next4biz BPM. Reduce costs and increase efficiency like never before.

Most organizations work with multiple software applications addressing the needs of different business functions and/or departments. As part of successful digitalization, these systems have to be linked and integrated to enable seamless and uninterrupted cross-functional and cross-departmental process execution. next4biz BPM provides the perfect integration solution for this purpose.

Besides enabling transparent communication among enterprise applications, next4biz BPM facilitates the configuration of processes or process segments running within one application to be triggered by events occurring on another application through integration. As an example, an invoicing process can be triggered on the accounting system by a sales event occurring on the marketing and sales application. This process can in turn trigger a stock movement process in the ERP application.

Furthermore, these processes can be managed from a single next4biz BPM interface utilizing iFrame’s. It is sufficient to identify the target application to next4biz BPM just once, to begin profiting from the ease and efficiency made possible by this integration. next4biz BPM performs the work of web service discovery and signature detection without burdening the user. Like all aspects of next4biz BPM, this functionality is made accessible through a simple drag-and-drop style user interface.

Contact us now to schedule your organization-specific demo and witness the power of next4biz BPM in action.

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