Unit X. Business Process Management

 

Business Process Management (BPM) is a field of knowledge at the intersection between management and information technology, encompassing methods, techniques and tools to design, enact, control, and analyze operational business processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information. The term 'operational business processes' refers to repetitive business processes performed by organizations in the context of their day-to-day operations, as opposed to strategic decision-making processes which are performed by the top-level management of an organization.

BPM differs from business process reengineering, a management approach popular in the 1990s, in that it does not aim at one-off revolutionary changes to business processes, but at their continuous evolution. In addition, BPM usually combines management methods with information technology. BPM covers activities performed by organizations to manage and, if necessary, to improve their business processes. While such a goal is hardly new, software tools called business process management systems (BPM systems) have made such activities faster and cheaper. BPM systems monitor the execution of the business processes so that managers can analyze and change processes in response to data, rather than just a hunch.

The activities which constitute business process management can be grouped into three categories: design, execution and monitoring. Process design encompasses the design and capture of existing business processes, as well as the simulation of new ones. The software used to do this includes graphical editors that document processes, repositories that store process models, and business process simulationtools to run a process a large number of times in order to measure performance parameters such as average time and cost.

Good design reduces the number of problems over the lifetime of the system. Changes to business processes, resulting from changes in the context that a business operates in, are a current research area. The integration of software used to create graphical representations of workflows, as well as to implement and maintain these workflows makes evolution of business processes less stressful.

The traditional way to automate processes is to develop or purchase an application that executes the required steps of the process. However, in practice, these applications rarely execute all the steps of the process accurately or completely. Another approach is to use a federation of software and human intervention. Due to the complexity of the federated approach, documenting a process is difficult. This makes changing or improving the process difficult.

As a response to these problems, software has been developed that enables the full business process (as developed in the process design activity) to be defined in a computer language which can be directly executed by the computer. The system will either use services in connected applications to perform business operations (e.g. calculating a repayment plan for a loan) or, when a step is too complex to automate, will message a human requesting input. Compared to either of the previous approaches, directly executing a process definition is much more straightforward and therefore easier to improve. However, automating a process definition requires flexible and comprehensive infrastructure which typically rules out implementing these systems in a legacy IT environment.

The commercial BPM software market has focused on graphical process model development, rather than text-language based process models, as a means to reduce the complexity of model development. Visual programming using graphical metaphors has increased productivity in a number of areas of computing and is well accepted by users. Business rules have been used by systems to provide definitions for governing behavior, and a business rule engine can be used to drive process execution and resolution.

Process monitoring encompasses the tracking of individual processes so that information on their state can be easily seen and the provision of statistics on the performance of one or more processes. An example of the tracking is being able to determine the state of a customer order (e.g. ordered arrived, awaiting delivery, invoice paid) so that problems in its operation can be identified and corrected. In addition, this information can be used to work with customers and suppliers to improve their connected processes. Examples of the statistics are the generation of measures on how quickly a customer order is processed, how many orders were processed in the last month etc.. These measures tend to fit into three categories: cycle time, defect rate and productivity.

The degree of monitoring depends on what information the business wants to evaluate and analyze and how business wants it to be monitored, in real-time or ad-hoc. Here, business activity monitoring (BAM) extend and expand the monitoring tools in BPMS. Process mining is a collection of methods and tools related to process monitoring. The aim of process mining is to analyze event logs extracted through process monitoring and to compare them with an 'a priori' process model. Process mining allows process analysts to detect discrepancies between the actual process execution and the a priori model as well as to analyze bottlenecks.

 

Task I. Learn the following words by heart.

business process management – оптимизация бизнес-процессов

decision-making processes – процесс принятия решений

top-level management – менеджмент высшего звена

performance parameter -рабочий параметр

lifetime of the system – жизненный цикл системы

cycle time - время цикла

ad hoc - для данного специального случая, для данной специальной цели

создаваемый в каждом отдельном случае

process monitoring - контроль за ходом (технологического) процесса

event log - журнал регистрации событий

bottleneck -критический параметр

 

Task II. True or false?

1. Business process management involves both management and information technology.

2. Business process management has nothing in common with business process reengineering.

3. Good design doesn’t reduce the number of problems over the lifetime of the system.

4. Recently new software has been developed to improve documenting process.

5. Visual programming using graphical metaphors has increased productivity in a number of areas of computing and is well accepted by users.

6. The aim of process monitoring is to analyze bottlenecks.

 

Task III. Answer the following questions.

1. Who is responsible for performing strategic decision-making processes in the organization?

2. What are the three elements of business process management?

3. What has the commercial BPM software market focused on?

4. What spheres doe the process monitoring encompass?

5. What does the degree of monitoring depend on?

6. What is the aim of the process mining?

 

Task IV. Render the text into Russian

Digital control

Digital control is a branch of control theory that uses digital computers to act as a system. Depending on the requirements, a digital control system can take the form of a microcontroller to an ASIC to a standard desktop computer. Since a digital computer has finite precision extra care is needed to ensure the error in coefficients, A/D conversion, D/A conversion.

The application of digital control can readily be understood in the use of feedback. Since the creation of the first digital computer in the early 1940s the price of digital computers has dropped considerably, which has made them key pieces to control systems for several reasons:

• Cheap: under $5 for many microcontrollers;
• Flexibility: easy to configure and reconfigure through software;
• Static operation: digital computers are much less prone to environmental conditions than capacitors, inductors, etc.;
• Scaling: programs can scale to the limits of the memory or storage space without extra cost;
• Adaptive: parameters of the program can change with time.

 

Task V. Read the text, find key words, look them up in the dictionary, and render the text into English.

Контроллинг

Контроллинг — это комплексная система управления предприятием включающая в себя управленческий учёт, учёт и анализ затрат с целью контроля всех статей затрат, всех подразделений и всех составных производимой продукции или услуги и их последующего планирования. Контроллинг обеспечивает информационно-аналитическую поддержку процессов принятия решений при управлении организацией (предприятием, корпорацией, органом государственной власти).

Современный контроллинг включает в себя управление рисками (страховой деятельностью предприятий), обширную систему информационного снабжения предприятия, систему оповещения путём управления системой ключевых («финансовых») индикаторов, управление системой реализации стратегического, тактического и оперативного планирования и систему менеджмента качества. В различных странах занимающиеся контроллингом менеджеры (контроллёры) могут иметь различный уклон. Так например в США присутствует сильный финансовый уклон (бюджетирование, управление страховками, управление налоговой стороной и т. д.).

 

Список литературы

 

1. Industry, Technology and the Global Marketplace: International Patenting Trends in Two New Technology Areas // Science and Engineering Indicators, 2002.

2. Technology news, BBC News at www.bbc.co.uk

3. www.britannica.com

 

 

Содержание

Unit I. Automation

Unit II. Robotics

Unit III. Contemporary Uses of Robots

Unit IV. Process Control

Unit V. Distributed control system

Unit VI. Controller

Unit VII. Total Quality Management

Unit VIII. ISO 9000

Unit IX. Business Process Automation

Unit X. Business Process Management