Business process reengineering is emerging as one of the

crucial business strategies of the 1990s. Business process reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and reimplementation of business processes to achieve never-before-possible levels of quality, cost, throughput, and service. This is especially significant in an era of workforce downsizing and greater demands for shortened time to market and faster customer response. Organizations are currently engaging in business process reengineering in many domains, including financial services, telecom services, healthcare services, customer order fulfillment, manufacturing procedure automation, and electronic commerce.

 While business process reengineering provides a business

management concept, business process flow management (BPFM) softwareor more accurately, middlewareprovides the enabling technologies for business process reengineering to support flexible solutions for the management of enterprisewide operations, including: Process flow control, automation, and monitoring Resource allocation, authorization, and authentication Task initialization and data exchange End-to-end communication and security.

BPFM is more than just a technology. It offers an overall

environment and approach to unifying, automating, and measuring business processes. BPFM is not a technology supporting only business process reengineering. It can be used to manage existing non automated legacy processeswhat is often called paving the cow paths.

 Business Process Flow Management System At the enterprise level, the process to be managed can be

very complex, spanning several organizations with multiple steps being performed in parallel. In such cases, a BPFM system can act as the superstructure that ties together disparate systems whose business purposes are interconnected. A BPFM system provides procedural automation of a business process by managing the sequence of process activities and the invocation of appropriate human, instrument, or computer resources associated with various activity steps. It involves the high-level specification of flows, and provides the operational glue and environment support for managing and automating the flows, recovering from failures, and enforcing consistency. A BPFM system also enforces various administrative policies associated with resources and work. .

 The structure and flow of a business process managed by a BPFM system can be

preplanned or ad hoc.

Typically, a BPFM system: Provides a method for defining and managing the flow of a business

process. Supports the definition of resources and their attributes. Assigns resources to work. Determines which next steps will be executed within a business process and when they will be executed. Article 8 October 1996 Hewlett-Packard Journal 2 Ensures that the business process flow continues until proper termination. Notifies resources about pending work. Enforces administrative policies such as access control. Tracks execution and supports user inquiry of status. Provides history information in the form of an audit trail for completed business processes. Collects statistical data for process and resource bottleneck analysis, flow optimization, and automatic workload balancing.

 BPR: fundamental, radical, dramatic, process. Ignore existing processes and organization. Symptoms of a sick process: too many cases (in-process-inventory) (throughput time / service time)-ratio is too high service level (% in time) is too low Key performance indicators: throughput time, waiting time, service level

occupation rate, number of cases, ...

 Check the necessity of each task. Appoint a process manager. Appoint case managers. (Re)consider the size of each task. (Re)consider the trade-off between a generic process and

multiple versions of the same process. (Re)consider the trade-off between a generic task and multiple specialized tasks. Try to introduce more parallelism.

 Investigate new opportunities as a result of modern

technology. Optimize communication structure. Do not automate paper workflows! An electronic document is everywhere and nowhere. Use resources as if they are in the same room. Use a resource for what it is good at. Maintain as much flexibility as possible for the future. Avoid setup times by clustering tasks. Avoid setups and exploit routine by clustering cases.

A process design is evaluated on the basis of four key issues: time quality costs flexibility Often there is a trade-off!

 Throughput time is composed of:

service time (including set-up) transport time (can often be reduced to 0) waiting time sharing of resources (limited capacity) external communication (trigger time)

There are several ways to evaluate throughput/waiting

time:

average variance service level ability to meet due dates

 External: satisfaction of the customer

Product: product meets specification/expectation. Process: the way the product is delivered (service level)

Internal: conditions of work

challenging varying controlling

There is often a positive correlation between external and internal quality.

 Type of costs
fixed or variable,
human, system (hardware/software), or external, processing, management, or support.

Note the trade-off between human/system-related costs.

 The ability to react to changes.

Flexibility of
resources (ability to execute many tasks/new

tasks) process (ability to handle various cases and changing workloads) management (ability to change rules/allocation) organization (ability to change the structure and responsiveness to wishes of the market and business partners)

Costs

Time Flexibility Quality

(T+/-,Q+/-,C+/-,F+/-)

 Process Analysis

An operation is composed of processes designed to add value by

transforming inputs into useful outputs. Inputs may be materials, labor, energy, and capital equipment. Outputs may be a physical product (possibly used as an input to another process) or a service. Processes can have a significant impact on the performance of a business, and process improvement can improve a firm's competitiveness. understand the activities, their relationships, and the values of relevant metrics. Process analysis generally involves the following tasks:

The first step to improving a process is to analyze it in order to

Define the process boundaries that mark the entry points of the process inputs and the exit points of the process outputs.

Construct a process flow diagram that illustrates the various process activities and their interrelationships.

Determine the capacity of each step in the process. Calculate other measures of interest.

Identify the bottleneck, that is, the step having the lowest capacity.

Evaluate further limitations in order to quantify the impact of the bottleneck.

Use the analysis to make operating decisions and to improve the process.