What are the stages of the BPM lifecycle

BPM stands for Business Process model, to understand the client’s business process, we apply model and that we call it as BPM.

Through BPM we can understand a business current process, and why the existing process is in place. Process is collection of activities performed in some order to produce a specific output. To know a client’s business AS-IS process we should apply BPM.

The stages of BPM lifecycle are:

A Business process –

• Has a Goal: Most of the time it can be either profit making or improving the quality or it is supporting the process.

Profit- Most of the time business main purpose is to earn profit from the current running process.

Quality- The existence of the current process may be to Improve the quality which can increase profit margin or it can reduce the existing cost.

Support-The existing process may be in place to provide support to the business so that it performs faster work or process fast

• Has specific Inputs: It will have some sets of inputs, which need to be utilized so that it gets converted to output. If any resources are disposable, it is input.
• Uses Resources: It uses resources, to convert inputs to output, resources facilitate the process, resources are something which are re-usable in nature and cannot be disposed once used.
• Has specific Outputs: It has sets of outputs, based on inputs it will have outputs.
• Has a number of activities that are performed in some order: We have group of activities performed in some specific order to generate the desired output.
• Creating value to some kind of customer: The desired output should create value to end user. End users can be internal or external.

The value created in generic term to the user is ‘Satisfaction’ and in IT term is ‘User friendly application’

Internal end Users and External end Users:

Internal end users are someone who is internal to the organization like employees, who have the domain knowledge, who is aware about the process, can be given training too.

Whereas, External end users are someone who is external to the organization or company like customers, who don’t have domain knowledge, who is not much aware about the process and cannot provide training as they are in huge number, but what extra we can provide to the end customer is that we can provide ‘User friendly application’.

Questions need to be asked to know BPM

• What is the goal of the business, why this process is here?
• What inputs this process is going to take?
• What resources it is going to use?
• What output it is going to generate?
• What sets of activities it is going to perform?
• What value it is going to generate to the end users?

Advantage of BPM

• It helps to understand the existing process
• Once business process model is identified, it will help us to take decisions like where the process improvement is required, which part of the process needs support in the future, it helps to identify the gaps within the process so that some support can be provided with the help of some IT solution to improve he current process.
• Clarity on current process, which will help to improve future process.

We should try to understand a process from BPM perspective. Anything that comes in the way we should explain it from BPM, this BPM can work on any Domain, in all the respective domain we will come across process, that process we can view or understand through BPM.