Trend

Armed with BPM

There is a promising market for BPM in India fueled by organizations that understand its importance in helping them compete in cut-throat markets, writes Varun Aggarwal.

The rapid growth of the Indian economy is creating vast opportunities for various new businesses and business processes. Simultaneously, it is also propelling organizations to change their processes even faster to be in sync with their growth.

In the ERP era, processes were implicit and limited largely to workflow. While workflow is concerned with the application-specific sequencing of activities via predefined instruction sets, BPM (Business Process Management) is concerned with the execution and management of processes defined independently of any single application.

BPM is becoming increasingly important to organizations in all sectors which are facing competitive pressures, but striving for increased effectiveness. With BPM, one gains the necessary visibility, control and flexibility required to compete effectively in cut-throat markets.

Philip Beniac, President Asia Pacific, Cognos said, “In India, there are many companies that have grown from 200 to 2,000 employees in a matter of two years. Managing them, monitoring their performance and, at the same time, empowering employees with the ability to make quick decisions becomes a challenge. A BPM framework can address these issues in a short span of time.”

According to Gartner estimates, the Business Process Management Suites market in India was already worth $12.6 million circa 2006, with BFSI contributing about 31.4% of this number. However, it was Education (97.7%) and Wholesale Trade (12.7%) that had the highest year-on-year growth in 2006.

Ashish Raina, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner Software Group, added, “BPM enhances the underlying business fundamentals by forming a structured approach employing methods, policies, metrics, management practices and software tools to manage and continuously optimize an organization’s activities and processes.”

BI to BPM

All too often a company feels that once it has an ERP system in place, all that it needs is a Business Intelligence tool, and it fails to understand how BPM can add value to its business. BI is about using historical data to plan better for the future and make sound business decisions. BPM is about controlling processes with the flexibility to improve them continuously. Business processes are unique to every company and are a source of competitive advantage. A business process is highly dependent on organizational structure and the roles that people play in a company.

The combination of BPM and SOA is critical as Web services can be used to implement activities within a business process, and that business processes can, in turn, be externalized as a set of Web services. Narendra Shukla, Vice-President, Cordys Asia, added, “BPM links to legacy composite components and applications, orchestrates Web services, measures business activity and optimizes processes for better business results and work throughput. As you can see, BPM is quite different from the workflow of old, but still it does help workflow through businesses at a global and local level.”

BPM drivers

In the past, workflow and document management tools were used to partially automate document flow and approvals within an enterprise. The major limitation of these tools was the absence of XML Web Services Standards-based Intelligent Integration Layer for leveraging the applications layer and moving messages and data. BPM takes it to the next level where the focus is on agility and operational excellence with the help of continuous process improvement.

Today an ideal BPM suite provides a set of services and tools for explicit process management (explicit to see, model, analyze, monitor, administer and improve) including support for human and application level interaction.

BPM allows users to monitor the execution of individual processes, to analyze the overall behavior of a set of business processes, to verify their successful performance, and provide input for process optimization. The following are some of the reasons as to why there is an urgent need for BPM solutions in India:

• Large volumes of data: While ERP and BI applications remain the building blocks for BPM suites, they also act as catalysts to the growth of this framework. There is a huge amount of data that is generated by these tools and it needs to be utilized more efficiently to fully exploit its potential.
• Competitive environment: In a fast growing competitive environment, it is a matter of survival of the fittest. Change is the only constant in today’s environment and the ability to change rapidly determines the strength of your enterprise in the market. Enterprises therefore need a framework which helps them change without incurring heavy costs on new tools and applications.
• Mergers and acquisitions: New mergers and acquisitions are becoming quite common and India Inc. seems bullish about adopting an inorganic growth path. BPM helps enterprises streamline their processes in the event of a M&A deal in a shorter period of time.
• Reducing decision time: When things keep changing every other moment, decision time keeps shrinking and at the same time there is no margin for error. Taking refuge in technology could be your only option here which would also help in harnessing existing resources.
• Resources becoming expensive and scarce: As things like electricity, human resources and storage become costlier and scarce, there is an urgent need to efficiently manage the available resources.

Satishchandra Nayak, Head-Center of Excellence for BPM & ITG, Patni, explained, “BPM has caught on today because it has matured from being [a set of] glorified workflow tools to [a set of] complete process management platforms. The technology enables you to model your processes through a GUI that is friendly enough for a business user to effectively use it. It also provides the capability to directly feed this process map to an engine to execute the process without going through the intermediate step of converting the process map into code. This enables rapid deployment of processes.”

Typically, process modelers also provide the capability to simulate processes and validate them to determine if they are optimal. The process engine also has additional capabilities or has connectors such as adapters to various applications, a rules engine, an analytical engine and a BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) component. These allow the user to manage the process lifecycle (model, deploy, monitor, analyze and optimize) through a single application. The underlying complexities of application interplay are abstracted from the user.

Getting past hurdles

The features offered by BPM tools may lead one to think that this framework has no limits and that it will be accepted sans hiccups. However, like any other technology or framework, there are many hurdles in the adoption of BPM as well.

Shukla pointed out, “Companies have process objectives, models, and workflows, but no way of rigorously and automatically communicating with the IT components that execute them. Consequently, in the process world, what we hear right now is not a symphony but a cacophony.” High-level business architecture is itself moving to a loosely coupled, componentized, service-oriented paradigm; it makes sense, therefore, to ask if your BPM vendor’s technology architecture is based on SOA principles from the ground up.

Raina, warned that BPMS adoption is likely to be hindered by cultural rather than by technology issues. It requires that business and IT teams work together in an iterative fashion throughout the entire business process lifecycle and for that very reason BPM adoption will lag in companies that lack this cultural perspective and collaborative ability. “Many organizations may find it difficult to shift design philosophies and skill sets from application-centric to business-process-centric development and integration approaches. The growth of the BPMS market will be constrained by the availability of necessary skills. Companies that need assistance in re-engineering their business processes will be hindered by the scarcity of workers with business process knowledge,” added Raina.

If these shortfalls of BPM are carefully tackled with and overcome, this framework can help your organization to gain the extra competitive mileage that you have been eagerly looking for.

varun.aggarwal@expressindia.com