A Roadmap to Effective Business Process Management

by Sapna N. Modi, Lead — SAP Consulting, L&T Infotech (July 2010)

This guide to an enterprise-wide business process management (BPM) strategy focuses on the features in SAP Solution Manager that you can use for the four phases of BPM. It also highlights the use of solution maps and third-party products (such as ARIS, HP Quality Center, and HP QuickTest Professional) that have standard integration adapters for SAP Solution Manager.

Categories: Administration, Business Process Management, Solution Manager

Key Concept

An effective implementation of a business process management (BPM) strategy ensures the optimization, automation, and scalability of business processes. BPM has four distinct phases in its life cycle: business process discovery, mapping, monitoring, and governance and change management.

A business process management (BPM) initiative is not a one-time activity for an organization — it is an iterative and evolving process that follows a maturity path. SAP Solution Manager, along with certain third-party products, can help you manage the four phases of the BPM life cycle:

Phase I: Business process discovery, standardization, and modeling
Phase II: Business process mapping
Phase III: Business process monitoring
Phase IV: Business process governance and change management

The major motive behind a BPM initiative is optimizing a company’s business processes through standardization, which can lead to cost-effective consolidations and shared services operating units. Here are some of the other benefits you can achieve using BPM:

Greater innovation in products or services based on the user’s primary business as a result of process optimization and availability
Smooth process execution and continuity
Process excellence with significant operating cost savings
Identification of critical key performance indicators (KPIs) that you need to measure for reliable business decisions
Improved quality of services and products, as well as process knowledge management
Enhanced automation of business processes such as workflow and increased productivity
Facilitation of process management as a milestone for service-oriented architecture (SOA) adoption
Improved compliance alignment
Facilitation of new roles and responsibilities with improved ownership
Increased transparency in business teams
Shift from a pure IT staff to a business-oriented IT staff
Improved business and IT communications as a result of shared motivation toward a common goal

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