In order to react quickly to market changes, companies today need a clear understanding of their business processes and the ability to change them quickly. Business processes represent an company’s key assets. A company’s ability to manage these processes and quickly adapt them to address market changes is critical.
Business process management (BPM) is a discipline combining software capabilities and business expertise to accelerate business process improvement and facilitate business innovation. BPM governs an organization's cross-functional, core business processes. It helps companies achieve strategic business objectives by directing the deployment of resources from across the organization into efficient processes that create customer value. This focus on driving overall success by integrating end-to-end business processes, people and systems to pptimize core work, which differentiates BPM from traditional, functional management. BPM also promotes continuous process improvements, which increase value generation through more effective business processes, a more efficient work force, and IT-based business processes that allow for quick, model-based changes..
So how do you get started with BPM? How do you get a handle on all these business processes that make up your business? Who do you talk to, how do you collect the process data, and what tools are available to help make sense of the data? This article addresses the issue of business process discovery, the first crucial step to get started with BPM.
What is business process discovery
Business process discovery (BPD) refers to the tools and methodologies that enable you to identify and document existing business processes. This identification and description of a company's business processes is the first step to business process modeling and analysis, which then leads to business process optimization, automation, and monitoring, as shown in Figure 1.
Some of the challenges of BPM are determining what descriptive information needs to be gathered and from whom, and mapping the finding to the company’s business goals in order to identify processes needing improvement. If this step is not done correctly, all the following steps in BPM will suffer. For example, you could wind up with automated business processes that may perform better than the existing processes, but still don’t meet your overall business performance goals.
Figure 1. BPD is the first step in identifying business processes for optimization
Gathering information about business processes can be split into two main phases:
- Discovery: Identifying and gathering basic knowledge about business processes
- Modeling: Enhancing existing business process models with detailed information for advanced business process analysis (BPA) and automated business process execution (BPE).
The key steps in business process discovery and modeling are:
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Talk to the right people
It's not always easy to find the people in an organization that have the business process knowledge you need to understand the business processes. There is often a discrepancy in the knowledge of a business process between business leaders (such as senior- or mid-level management or Line-of-Business process owners) and the people that actually execute the business processes. This is often true even if the business processes are well-documented.
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Capture the basic process map
During BPD, you don’t necessarily need the full details about the business processes that might be required later for process analysis or automation. In the beginning, you only need to understand the basic business process activities, or the steps in the process. For each business activity, you need to capture the required resources. Finally, you need to understand how these activities combine to form the business process to meet the business goals.
During BPD, you need to work with process owners and participants to identify business process issues, so that you can begin to identify potential improvements to overcome existing shortcomings. First, you need to describe known issues. In order to do that, you need to write down where the problems reside, what the possible causes may be, and may be some initial ideas on how to overcome these issues. However, be aware that different people look at processes from different angles. Address this issue by inviting different groups of people to review iterations of your process model.
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Enrich the business process model
After gathering initial data and reviewing it with process owners and participants, you need to gather additional data to describe the business processes in more detail for more precise documentation and to lead into business process analysis. If business process descriptions are rich enough, they can be used to create execution models that will be used by process engines for business process automation.
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Analyze the business processes to show business process improvements
This step goes beyond basic BPD, because BPA requires quite a bit of detail about the business processes, such as timely behavior, cost information, or knowledge about applicable resource allocation models. In addition, you need information about the current and expected volumes of current and future business processes. If you know this, you can compare process improvement investment costs with future business process savings, in terms of time, money and resources.
Based on customer engagements, we've seen that the last two steps require significant time and experience, but the pay-off of having calculated proof points before investing in business process optimization is significant.
In the following sections, we'll take a closer look at each of these BPD steps.
All of the people interviewed during BPD need to understand why they are being interviewed. If they don't, they'll likely not give you all the information you need. This is true for both process owners and process participants. Interviewees need to understand that BPD is about identifying strengths, as well as weaknesses. They key objective is to achieve overall process understanding for future optimization.
It's impossible to document all the business processes of an organization at once, so you need to identify a dedicated business area to get started. This could be your sponsoring business unit; for example, sales, human resources, marketing, logistics. Once you know where to start, you need to identify the people you'll interview to learn about current business process implementations.
Who should you interview? If there is a process owner, start there. That person should have some understanding of the business processes involved, and might even be able to provide existing business process documentation, which you can use for further process discovery. The process owner should have an interest in optimizing the business processes. If there is no process owner, talk to the process participants. Ask them for process or work flow descriptions. The more information you can collect up front the better.
Now as you know who to talk, you can move to the next step of BPD, which is to capture the basic process map. Depending on your findings in the first step, choose one of the following options:
Option 1 – The process has an owner and some process documentation is available
Verify the process documentation with the process owner, and interview two or three process participants to verify that the process descriptions are accurate. If so, dig for more details with the owner and participants, such as information about activity durations, resource assignments, cost information and so on.
Option 2 – The process has no owner, but some process documentation is available.
Invite a maximum of five process participants to a meeting to discuss the existing process documentation. Print out the documentation and hand out a copy to each attendee. Verify the process description and identify any parts that are no longer valid. If there are many deviations from the existing process definitions, move to Option 3.
Option 3 – The process has no owner, and no process documentation is available.
This is the toughest case, but probably also the most common. As with Option 2, invite a maximum of five process participants to a meeting. They may come from various functional areas in the organization, but they must be in touch with the targeted process. Moderate a session to describe the business process and outline the findings either on a white board, or even better, use the metaplan, or card, technique.
Use the following guidelines to moderate the meeting:
- Limit the session to two hours.
- Agree on the overall goal of the business process with respect to a given company strategy, discuss whether the process is good or bad.
- Capture a maximum of twenty process steps. These should be the most important steps.
- Explain to the attendees what process constructs you use and why. Examples are activities, decisions, subprocesses, connectors, repositories, loops, and so on.
- Add process decisions to the process map, label the cases. For example, if you use a decision node to visualize whether a request is approved or not, you might label one case "approved" and the other case "rejected".
- Assign unique names to the activities and decisions. Naming process objects correctly is critical, because it helps everyone looking at the process model to immediately understand what the process is all about. For example, a good naming conventions is to always name an activity with a verb and a noun, such as "request approval", "review order", or "print letter."
- List who is responsible for each activity.
- Identify additional characteristics for each activity, as appropriate
- Identify and lists any known process problems or potential areas for improvement, and add them to the process map.
You should now have basic information for one dedicated process. You can now begin to use WebSphere Business Modeler (Modeler) for business process discovery.
Create the business model with Modeler
Modeler is IBM's tool for business process modeling. You can use it for business process discovery, for ongoing detailed business process documentation, and for complex business process analysis. You can select completed business process models for automation, and use Modeler to add the technical information required for a process engine for automation. The target process automation environment for business processes completed in Modeler is WebSphere Process Server), as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Modeler overview
Figure 4. More detailed process model
For BPD, you only need to use the most basic features of Modeler, which makes it easy to get up and running. The advantage of using Modeler to model your business processes is that all processes and their objects are related objects with directly assigned attributes. This means that they are described according to a standard and that they know about each other. For example, every activity includes duration and cost information, and Modeler allows you to generate just one report that shows you all that information in just one screen. In addition, you can reuse activities and subprocesses in other processes. If you then change an attribute in one of these activities, it is automatically updated wherever it is used. As you move from BPD to modeling, you can add more and more detail, starting with a very simply process model, as captured in the initial phases of BPD and ending with a very rich business process model.
For BPD, you can use Modeler Basic. (Modeler Advanced is required to perform advanced business process analysis, including simulation, and export capabilities to Rational® software development tools and WebSphere Process Server for business process automation.) With Modeler Basic, you can depict business process models in a simplified but structured way, modeling a process map from left to right. Figure 3 illustrates the following basic information about a process:
- The process start (indicated by the green dot)
- A set of activities (three are displayed, more are available on scrolling to the right)
- A decision node
- A number of annotations describing the process, how it can be improved, and whether it fits into a company goal.
- Additional information about activity responsibilities (ManagerCC) and timely behavior (1 hour)
Figure 3. A basic process model
Capturing a business process in a model like this makes it easy for everyone looking at the process model to get a basic understanding of the business process.
Now that you have a basic process map, the next step is to review it with the process owners and participants. If the process is not complete, which is likely, solicit ideas about where to find more information. With continued investigation, you'll be able to flesh out the process model with more data, as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4. More detailed process model
As you can see in Figure 4, during ongoing process discovery, we were able to add the following information:
- Data used in the process was assigned to the activities as well as to the flows (see data object PSCInvoice)
- Additional resources were added (see resource SoftwareSystem, which indicates these steps integrate with some software systems)
- Activities were colored to show what is done by what resource.
Over time, we'll continue to add more information until we end up with a rich and complete business process model.
The real advantage in using a tool like Modeler is this ability to continually enrich the process map with information that enables you to to get a full understanding of the process and its activities. Using the Modeler Attributes view, you can specify details like the following to provide more insight into the process and activities:
- Specify the data is available to the process or activities
- Specify the data created by the process or its activities
- Assign additional cost information to the activities
- Assign additional resources (or responsibilities) to the resources
- Assign additional cost information to the resources
- Assign additional time information to the activities
- Assign additional availability information to the resources
- Assign additional information to the activities to specify owning organizations or locations where the activities are carried out
- Group activities into reusable subprocesses
- Import existing WSDL service descriptions into Modeler and build the business process using these as activities
- Addi more structured process objects (like decisions, forks, loops) to enable advanced business process analysis
- Add simulation scenarios to run realistic process execution forecasts
- Run simulations for various business process models to find the best process alternatives depending on pre-defined business goals
Figure 5 shows attributes assigned to various projects. You can see the attributes available for an activity, including its resource assignments.
Figure 5. Modeler Attributes view
By the time you've added all of the above to the process model, you have passed well beyond basic BPD. and are entering into business process analysis, which is beyond the scope of this article.
Using simple flow charting tools falls short
If, instead of a tool like Modeler, you use software that only supports basic flow charts, you end up with a flat process map that doesn't allow you to add more information to the process map in a sophisticated, convenient and reusable way.
The main advantage to flow charting is also it's biggest disadvantage. Because there are no rules for how to capture business processes, all possible modeling conventions are accepted and used. The lack of modeling standards leads to many different types of process diagrams, which can be interpreted in many ways. Adding detailed information as described above is cumbersome because the process objects have no attributes, and the people creating the flow charts will have to use text boxes, and arrange them manually when moving other objects. Additional tools are required to add descriptions to show who does what, how long it takes, to provide descriptions for steps, and so on. Flow charts may be okay for the very first steps in business process documentation, but as the business process modeling becomes more complex, they fall short very quickly.
Figure 6 shows a basic flow chart. All the information here is added in free form. For example, different people may use different ways to add the duration information, or information about responsibilities. The free form, unstructured nature of the flow chart allows a wide range for interpretation. This is less than ideal for business process modeling, in which you want to be as precise as possible.
Figure 6. Basic flow chart
As more companies become interested in BPM, business process modeling is becoming more important, and the need for professional business process modeling tools, like Modeler, becomes more apparent. Modeler allows you to import existing process documentation, such as documentation done with flow charting tools, to add the information necessary for rich process documentation.
So what have you learned about BPD?
- Although it takes time and commitment, BPD is the critical first step in BPM. What you miss in BPD will have ramifications down the road.
- Although you may start without a professional software tool like Modeler, you will eventually need a professional tool in order to create detailed process documentation for analysis, so that you can work on process improvements, and communicate them appropriately.
- BPD is a team discipline. It is not enough to have a few people in an organization caring about business process documentation. In order to have the most accurate information about processes, everyone in the organization has to support the endeavor to gather the process knowledge. When complete, the process models need to be reviewed to determine whether the processes are in line with the overall company strategy, and if not, what steps need to be taken to align them.
- Shortcomings in business processes may lead to outsourcing decisions, or to acquisitions to offer better or new services to the customers. In order to make these difficult business decisions, various business process and operations improvements need to be validated, compared, and tested before being implemented. The only way to do this effectively is to perform business process analysis.
- Effective BPD will change an organization's core business processes and operations and have a positive impact on customers, business partners and company employees. BPD, therefore, is not only the entry point into BPM, but is also the entry point into trusted and business transformation. It may start with a very simple and basic process map, but it will evolve to structured and rich process models, ready for analysis and automation.
- Software tools offering only basic drawing capabilities to outline boxes and connectors reach their limits quickly, as people performing BPD find that they cannot easily add more details to the maps. Modeler was created to support detailed business process modeling, beginning with fundamental BPD engagements. It can be used by users who don't want or need to work with a complicated and hard-to-learn tools. Modeler is easy to use, with a short learning curve for beginners, but is robust enough to used to document complete, rich and structured processes to enable mission-critical decision making based on realistic simulations. These capabilities are vital to making the right business decisions.
In summary, WebSphere Business Modeler is an easy-to-use tool for business process discovery, documentation, modeling and analysis. You can start with the Basic edition of Modeler and upgrade to the Advanced edition when you move from discover into more detailed modeling and analysis.
Start now to discover your business processes, using a tool like Modeler to support your growing requirements, enrich your models with more details to identify optimization areas, simulate and test the models, and finally decide only on those changes that will make your business more successful.
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An end-to-end solution using WebSphere Business Integration V6.0 products, Part 1: Model a business process with WebSphere Business Modeler
(developerWorks 2006): This article series demonstrates how to use WebSphere
Business Integration V6 products to model, assemble, deploy, and manage a business
process in an end-to-end solution using WebSphere Business Modeler, WebSphere
Integration Developer, WebSphere Process Server, and WebSphere Business Monitor.
Part 1 introduces you to IBM WebSphere Business Integration products and guides
you through the steps to model a business process in WebSphere Business Modeler
V6.0 based on a business scenario.
-
developerWorks BPM zone:
Get the latest technical resources on IBM BPM solutions, including downloads,
demos, articles, tutorials, events, webcasts, and more.
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Business Process Management enabled by SOA:
Get product information, including features and benefits.
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What is new in WebSphere Business Modeler 6.1
(developerWorks 2007): This article describes the new features of WebSphere
Business Modeler V6.1 that enhance business user productivity, support BPM
interoperability, and improve business modeling.
-
Exploring key facts about business
process management with IBM WebSphere software:
(IBM 2007) This IBM white paper explains four critical capabilities and strengths
of the IBM WebSphere business process management (BPM) offerings, and helps to
position them relative to offerings from other vendors. (PDF)
Roland Peisl has been involved with BPM at IBM since 1998. He has held several different roles in the BPM area, including software development, technical marketing, and product management. He currently works as a business and technical consultant in IBM's Business Process Management Competency Center, located in Boeblingen, Germany, where he focuses on WebSphere Process Integration products, as well as WebSphere Business Modeler and WebSphere Process Server.
You can reach Roland at psl@de.ibm.com.
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