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Chapter 1. Business Processes Overview
Many books and articles have documented the fiercely competitive nature of todays global marketplace. Most of these publications agree an organizations survival depends on delivering new products and services on an almost continuous basis, with ever-improving quality, better service, and decreasing prices. However, few organizations were designed forthese new competitive rules. The traditional hierarchical organization was proficient at controlling rapid growth during a time of rising demand, but has not proven effective at producing the innovation and responsiveness demanded by todays customer.
Faced with an increasingly difficult competitive environment, many organizations are reexamining their approach and developing new strategieswhich enable them to compete more effectively. The development of these strategies is beyond the scope of this document; our interest lies in the development of the business processes through which an organization executes its new strategy. To set the stage and get you thinking about business processes lets consider a typical business process, order fulfillment.
Order fulfillment includesthe activities which begin when a customer places an order and ends when the goods are delivered and payment collected. Typically, this process involves 10 or more steps performed by different individuals in different departments. Someone in customer service receives the order, logs it in, and checks it for completeness and accuracy. Then the order goes to accounting where someone runs a creditcheck on the customer. Next, someone in sales determines the price to charge. Then the order travels to inventory control, where someone checks to see if the goods are on hand. If not, the order gets routed to production scheduling, which issues a back order. Eventually, warehouse operations develops a shipment schedule, shipping determines the shipment method and picks the route and carrier. Producthandling picks the products from the warehouse, verifies the accuracy of the order, assembles the picked items, and loads them. Shipping releases the goods to the carrier which takes responsibility for delivering them to the customer.
When the customer asks for exactly what the process was designed to deliver, all is well. However, if the customer order deviates in even a small way fromthe standard process, or the customer tries to change their order once it is initiated, the chances of meeting customer expectations drop dramatically.
Process breakdowns occur because of the number of hand-offs and transitions and, when they do, there is little accountability because, although there are many groups involved in the process, often no single unit is responsible for successfulorder fulfillment.
To respond to the realities of the new economy, leading companies are restructuring around the business process, in our example, order fulfillment. The formerly hierarchic organization is flattened, replaced by a number of process teams responsible for the major organizational processes. Employees have evolved into process team members who more likely report to a processowner than a manager in the traditional sense. To provide the responsiveness, flexibility and accountability demanded by today....s customer, these teams are empowered to make their own decisions and encouraged to make changes which improve their processes on a continuous basis.
Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is the term often used to describe the collection of techniques which areused to model existing and develop new business processes and has been used successfully by a number of organizations to restructure the way they perform work. Because of its success, many organizations are beginning to rethink the role of organization structure and conclude work should be organized around the business process.
Based on the experience of its early adopters, business process...