Manage Your Process Management Tasks Effectively and Efficiently
With structured process management, you increase your quality and compete more effectively
In a fast-moving, globalized world, firmly established processes are essential for successful and sustainable business. This is the only way you can avoid errors and misunderstandings within the company. You can ensure consistently high quality through lived processes that enable comprehensible and reproducible decisions.
Read here what exactly process management actually is and which tasks and roles are behind it.
What Is Process Management?
The term "process management" or the term "business process management" (BPM) basically refers to the general handling of processes within the company.
Business process management includes the following process steps:
- Planning
- Implementation
- Analysis or monitoring
- Optimization
Process management regulates who carries out which activities at which point in time, involving which resources. This includes a clear assignment of responsibilities and roles as well as the associated tasks. This enables a company-wide understanding of the internal process landscape.
The goals behind this are manifold:
- Make processes more efficient
- Reduce costs
- Improve quality
- Increase flexibility
- Create transparency
Tasks of the Process Management
So what exactly are the tasks that fall within the scope of process management? Probably the most crucial task is to define a framework within which processes can function successfully. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify, model and describe existing processes in the company. This also includes the development, introduction and control of new processes, because not every task already has a defined process. Regular analyses then make it possible to repeatedly put process capability to the test, to derive measures for optimization, and to implement and track them.
The tasks of process management always pursue two central guiding questions: What is the goal of a process? And are all the tasks that contribute to achieving the goal clearly formulated?
These include, for example, compliance with the correct sequence of work steps and the effective and efficient distribution of tasks among the available resources.
This Is How Classic Process Management Works
How to get started with process management? While companies are often very unique in their philosophy, the basic tasks in process management are very similar in every company. We want to show you which common steps are necessary in classic process management.
Process selection
In the first step, it makes sense to get a general overview of the processes in the company and select the processes in which you see a need for optimization. Here it is crucial to keep the entire process landscape with the respective interfaces between the processes in mind so that the optimization of one process does not later negatively influence other processes.
Process representation
Once you have selected the appropriate process, it is important to visualize this process as clearly as possible without losing the overview due to an excessive level of detail. For this purpose, various methods are more or less suitable for a transparent process representation. With the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), the Object Management Group provides a standard that contributes to the standardization of the forms of representation. BPMN is a graphical language for representing and modeling business processes, which comprises more than 150 symbols in four superordinate categories. The modeling language uses the following categories:
- Flow Objects: basic building blocks of BPMN.
- Connecting Objects: connecting elements of all building blocks
- Artefacts: understanding/information building blocks
- Swimlanes and Pools: representation of the process participants
Due to the structured division of the individual process elements, different variants and sequences of the process can be compared in parallel. Process management can model individual interfaces and thus optimize them.
Process analysis
Once the process has been broken down into its individual process steps and responsibilities have been delineated, the process can be subjected to an as-is analysis. For this purpose, you could, for example, interview the employees involved and include objective key figures. The level of detail you go into depends mainly on your overall objective. If you initially want to analyze the process as a whole, it may not be appropriate to go into great detail about the individual process steps. At this point, you should carefully weigh up the effort and benefits. For the as-is analysis, it is important that the desired to-be process is already available for comparison.
Process evaluation
During the process analysis, you will probably notice details that inhibit the performance of the process in some way. Examples are missing work instructions or insufficiently specified interfaces. The process evaluation is there to identify exactly these gaps and to decide on optimization measures.
Process improvement
If it was decided in the process evaluation that a process improvement makes sense, then in the fifth and final step suitable improvement measures are first derived and implemented according to a schedule. But implementation alone is not enough: monitoring the improvement measures provides information on whether they are working and achieving their desired effect.
Sounds complex? It would be a lie to say that successful process management is not. The interaction of many factors, tasks and roles is crucial to whether process management runs efficiently in a company. For your peace of mind: There are smart solutions that take over and partially automate many of these tasks and roles for you. Rely on our subject matter experts at Arvato Systems and their many years of experience in the field of BPM. With our flexible solutions tailored to your company, Arvato Systems supports you in planning, building and maintaining an optimal process landscape.
Roles and Responsibilities at a Glance
But who is now responsible for these responsible tasks? After all, one person - such as a process manager - cannot handle this scope alone. Classic process management provides for various roles with clearly defined tasks. Depending on the company's size, these tasks and roles can, of course, be structured differently. Especially by using modern solutions in BPM, you can interpret the responsibilities precisely. With the support of automated processes, you will succeed in an intelligent distribution of tasks for your company.
CPO - Head of Process Management
The Chief Process Officer is the primary person responsible for the entire process management and often reports directly to the management. He sees process management in the context of the corporate strategy and derives the appropriate methods for his area of responsibility from this.
Process owner
The process owner is responsible for the strategic control of the process according to the CPO's specifications. In doing so, he or she assumes responsibility for process planning and controlling and ensuring the performance of the process.
Process manager
The process manager is responsible for the operational execution of the process. The process manager receives the strategic specifications from the process owner and is responsible for their implementation at the operational level. This includes the operative process control, including planning and controlling, and the coordination of the interfaces to other processes.
Process management consultant
Independent consultants are often called in when company-relevant changes in business process management are being considered. They can assess the situation with a neutral view and, for example, support the introduction of new methods or optimization of general business processes.
Process management coach
What does a process management coach do? While the process management consultant mainly deals with management positions, the process management coach provides advice and support to all process management roles and helps you to implement the process management specifications at the operational level, for example, in the planning of process activities or process analysis.
Process participant
A process participant implements each process step defined in the process. Thus, each process participant contributes to achieving the goal of the respective process.
Process controller
The process controller supports the CPO and the process owners in their strategic process control by preparing the relevant key figures and suggesting appropriate reactions or activities.
Process auditor
A process auditor is responsible for ensuring proper process execution. To this end, he regularly conducts audits to check, for example, that the process documentation is being viewed and that improvement measures are being pursued.
The classic distribution of roles covers all tasks and areas of process management, but consumes many resources in the process, especially in the area of personnel. For more efficiency in your company's process management, Arvato Systems offers intelligent, digital solutions from consulting and modeling to monitoring and the optimization and automation of your process management.
What Are the Advantages for You as a Company?
So many tasks, different roles and possibilities for process management - is it even worth the effort to introduce external specialists into the company's internal structures? And can this complex subject area even be covered by digital solutions? The answer is clearly yes!
Top-structured process management can help your company gain a very good overview of your processes and methodically identify and eliminate weak points. This is especially true for large companies with complex structures, but medium-sized and smaller companies can also benefit from these advantages. Process management can be applied both to your primary processes - i.e., processes that are directly related to the value creation of your products, for example, production processes - and to secondary processes such as personnel development or quality management. This enables you to improve quality, increase your efficiency and thus set yourself apart from your competitors on the market, which in turn contributes to business growth. You also create greater transparency within your company and strengthen your employees' understanding of processes.
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