Collaborative Minds Blog - page 31
Business process management System, or BPMS, can be an intimidating concept. That’s understandable, considering the many explanations out there that are riddled with jargons most people don’t have the time or patience to dig deep into.
This article aims to explain in simple language the fundamentals of BPM.
You might have watched an episode of a TV series, where a guy has travelled through the US and sold vacuum cleaners to housewives. He rang the doorbell and offered to clean one of the rooms in the house just to demonstrate his product – early fifties.
Despite the proliferation of team-based software and other tools to facilitate interdepartmental functions, a lot of businesses are still tackling their operations the traditional way – traditional, in this sense, meaning standalone business management solutions for every business function (HR, Finance, IT Helpdesk, Software Development, Sales and Marketing, and the like). While this business approach has its merits, there are also a lot of setbacks, oftentimes trumping the advantages.
It is awesome when you already have automated processes and improved performance inside your department with some kind of a good process management system. Yet the gold mine is hidden elsewhere. When you want to bring your company to a new level of performance, when you seek to make a difference in the market, you need to act at a higher level improving cross-departmental operations. Tasks which are not lost on the way from one department to another, is a high priority matter which is tied up with much bigger budgets and benefit.
We had this problem when we were preparing the documentation: different people on our team were preparing some parts of material and it was absolutely impossible to come to the office in the morning and find out if there were already some papers prepared and if you could use them for your work. Emails didn’t help much because there were times when somebody forgot to notify you about a newly created document and you could only find out about its very existence from a 3rd party only when it’s already too late: you had done all the research yourself and created your own paper.
Implementation of Internal communication with Web 2.0 technologies\social technologies results in:
- 32% operational costs reduction
- 22% reduction in time to market for product services
Building standards for the industry is sometimes a requirement that cannot be avoid, as is the case for financial activity, product certification, education – and many others, where standards are usually required by government.
When your company gets an invoice from an electric company, your president does not simply open his safe and get money from there like it was 150 years ago. Today companies register all accounts payable in specialized accounts payable tracking software, for their comfort, cost and time savings. Comindware Tracker Finance and Back Office Administration Solution offers a perfect accounts payable tracking software automation facility.
If you’re following our blog for some time already, you already know a lot about the benefits which BPM brings to your company. I can count many of them, including visibility, higher efficiency and productivity, control over daily operations and more predictable results, and much more, of course.
Almost everyone who works with emails on a daily basis and uses their email client as the main instrument for tracking their work, knows about the “Follow Up” feature. I have used this feature for several years in Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird (via extension). This actually helped me improve my productivity – I have started following up important letters, which required action from me or my counterparts. And, as a result, I had a better, clearer overview of my daily & weekly tasks and never forgot about promises I gave.
Today we’re going to touch upon the slippery subject of health & safety incidents which is not only interesting to safety engineers. First of all, whenever a health & safety incident occurs, it is not only human life and health which is in danger (and is precious). The company budget may suffer from huge compensation claims for these issues. That is why not only preventing health & safety incidents, but also their careful investigation is crucial. When we say investigation, we don’t mean that the person to blame needs to be found, but rather a careful investigation needs to be carried out to find the root of the problem in order to prevent incidents from happening in the future.