Business process management-Survey and methodology

Due to the growing concern about the competitiveness of U.S. industry in the international marketplace, several initiatives are now underway to enhance the competitive posture of the nation’s firms. Many companies are engaged in assessing ways in which their productivity, product quality, and operations can be improved. A relatively new area of such improvements is business process management (BPM). BPM can be any structured approach used to analyse and continually improve fundamental activities, such as manufacturing, marketing, communications, and other major elements of a company’s operation. This paper describes a generic step-by-step method for BPM which encompasses methods employed in industry from incremental improvements to re-engineering. To better understand BPM, the authors have conducted a survey of major U.S. companies’ on their approaches to process quality assessment. This report summarizes the findings of the survey and the authors work with a number of leading companies, and may be useful to quality managers and other involved in total quality management, continuous improvement, or re-engineering efforts, From these activities, it is apparent that there is wide interest in BPM across all industries, However, the specific approach for implementation of BPM varies from company to company. That notwithstanding, there is a great deal of commonality among the specific approaches which this paper captures and unifies. Due to this interest in BPM, a number of methods and tools, including software, have been used or developed to aid in its implementation. The authors relate some of these methods and tools to the individual steps of the generic BPM method.