Old posts from bpm.com

The difference may seem subtle but in practice the time interval from successful acceptance testing to production work of the equipment may vary considerably. Why is that so? Because for a customer it’s a one-time (or rare) project so it’s hard to anticipate all possible issues. For the supplier, on the contrary, it’s a regular process. So they’ve got a lot of experience that may be used to help the customer launch the equipment without delays. (more…)

Virtually every company becomes caught by the business process idea, sooner or later. The BPM promises – sales up! costs down! unprecedented agility! – make people eager to implement the “BPM thing” as soon as possible, if not yesterday (more…)

Here is what the company CEO has told:

“It also happens that when the ordered pipes are finally delivered, they are partially used for emergency need, e.g. to fix a breakage happened elsewhere. As a result, the original customer won’t get the ordered goods. It won’t be a problem because often there is enough time to re-order but the point is that no one knows that the order will not be delivered.” (more…)

Many business process management initiatives over the world suffer from the same pitfall. Most projects are successful in identifying and solving a particular business problem by redesigning and/or constantly improving the corresponding business process. The ROI figures are impressive and BPM gains the trust from executives. Yet attempts to leverage on the initial success to apply BPM enterprise-wide are often far less successful. (more…)

In reality, however, most organizations have to deal with processes, projects and cases which are somewhere between the two. Therefore they need a balanced, unbiased view of projects, processes and cases that in essence are just different kinds of collaborative work. Projects, projects and cases have more in common than it may seem at the first glance: whatever approach is taken, there always is an initial state, resources and goals to be reached. (more…)

It happens all the time: as soon as we find a solution for a problem, the solution becomes a problem itself. The division of labor is not an exception: it increases the productivity indeed, but it also decreases in other cases. (more…)

Let’s start with the functional management. First, there are standalone applications – accounting, warehouse, product lifecycle management (PLM), advanced planning & scheduling (APS), etc. targeted to specific departments. Historically, these applications have appeared first as the earliest form of management was functional management. (more…)

In the previous article we divided the collaborative work continuum into projects, processes, cases, document-oriented workflows and issues.

We also noted that it was made for analysis purposes only; in reality, they are interrelated. As an illustration, the PMBOK (Process Management Body of Knowledge) talks about processes more than about projects; similarly, the big part of BPM CBOK (Business Process Management Common Body of Knowledge) is devoted to processes improvement and process transformation projects. (more…)

BPM is full of terms that are either ambiguous (which is inevitable to some extent) or taken for granted. One term that no one bothers to explain is “end-to-end process”.

Some people believe it means a process spanning through the organization from one end to another. However, it’s rather the description of a cross-functional process.

(more…)