Table of Contents

BPM technology can be used to model, automate, measure, and optimize business processes across organizational divisions, systems, and applications. BPM is proven to make business processes more efficient, agile, and transparent.

Visibility

By sharing data and connecting information systems, BPM provides visibility into processes that span multiple departments and functional domains. It also facilitates troubleshooting and can help determine the answers to questions about the stage of the process, the performance of the team, and the score on a key performance indicator via real-time dashboards that are fed by data from business activity monitoring.

Companies typically use many different applications to run their businesses. Despite this emphasis on automation, functional white spaces remain, forcing many of these organizations to perform a variety of manual tasks. BPM systems automate these tasks and fill process gaps by integrating and orchestrating end-to-end processes that span many different applications.

As the University of Adelaide discovered, using BPM technology to enhance essential business functions is easier and more economical than trying to adapt core applications with extensions and customizations. BPM has enabled the university to enhance its Oracle's PeopleSoft applications with a new layer of business logic that spans multiple applications and can be changed quickly as business needs dictate.

Video: Learn how the University of Adelaide simplified IT with standard ERP applications and customized middleware.

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Let your business applications, including Oracle and non-Oracle applications, do what they were designed to do: streamline operations and automate core business functions. If you need to add new capabilities or integrate two or more applications, use BPM technology to orchestrate these disparate activities into a unified process. Avoid making unnatural and persistent changes to "force fit" your legacy applications with customizations. Instead, as your business evolves, rely on model-driven BPM processes to enhance existing applications and link disparate processes in a cohesive, cost-effective way. As the University of Adelaide learned, it is much simpler to change your middleware than it is to change the logic inside your ERP system.

Screencast: The New Business Imperative: Social, Mobile, Cloud

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How can you ensure that your applications have visibility into all systems, departments, and channels? By using BPM as the unifying fabric you can orchestrate business activities across systems, departments, and channels as well as remove process inconsistencies and inefficiencies. For example, you can align your marketing, sales, and services groups by creating a BPM workflow that structures the customer lifecycle with appropriate handoffs from one department to the next and adds systematic updates to all associated business processes.

Social BPM

Customers frequently share information about your company, products, and markets via social networks. They may also reach out to you directly via applications such as Facebook and Twitter. Making social channels a part of your process allows you to engage customers both directly and indirectly as you resolve their issues and discover new product ideas. For example, a customer tweet might kick off a help desk process or initiate a product enhancement request.

Social capabilities such as discussion threads, activity streams, and chat sessions are useful tools for collaboration and innovation—both within your organization as well as with customers and partners. Integrating social capabilities into your business processes facilitates collaboration by giving everybody more opportunities to interact.

Mobile BPM

Mobile devices let people access corporate applications and complete tasks while on the go. In this "always-on" world, customers expect to be able to make a purchase, report a problem, or accept an offer from anywhere, on any device. Most new software applications not only leverage these mobile devices, but also can use calendars, GPS devices, and other onboard apps to make contextual decisions and recommendations to users. This rich arsenal of functionality not only influences what products are offered based on time, location, and previous activities, it also opens up a new world of interaction between you and your customers

Many of today's businesses are always open—customers interact continually, from wherever they are. To compete in this dynamic marketplace you not only must be available when your customers need you, you also need to be alert to the opportunities of the moment. You must be able to recognize the unique potential of each interaction and be ready to make a targeted offer or resolve a particular issue based on location, recent history, and current circumstances. Success depends on how responsive and informed you are, as well as on how quickly you can react to new and emerging events. Volatility comes in many forms.

• Change in regulations
• Change in competition
• New products and services
• Customer issues
• Change in company policies

Real-Time Sense and Respond

BPM technology uses a logical, step-by-step approach to structure a business process. Each step in the process can be informed by the previous step, as well as by any other step, data, and pattern of behavior deemed relevant. This finely tuned structure enables a "sense and respond" mode of operation. Once a luxury only for highly evolved, mission-critical business systems, it is quickly becoming the default for many types of business systems. Managers can create automated business processes that define, correlate, and monitor events—issuing alerts, sending notifications, and spawning other processes as necessary.

Oracle BPM Suite includes adaptive case management capabilities to accommodate these unpredictable, long-running business processes, many of which require investigation and collaboration. As an integral part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware family, Oracle BPM Suite includes content management facilities, Web portal development tools, agile business rules management capabilities, and complex event processing functions. This mature technology platform lets you add work, include collaborators, trigger events, and alter a workflow during the execution.

• Efficiency: With BPM you can automate manual activities, design efficient processes, remove bottlenecks throughout your organization, and gain efficiencies. Metrics for efficiency can include the number of orders processed per day, loans processed per month, and cases closed after first interaction. Gains from these should be included when calculating value from BPM.
• Compliance: Is your business at risk of falling out of compliance or not meeting a government regulation? Are your auditing costs too high? Do you have SLAs that could expose you to penalties? BPM helps you design processes to comply with official requirements and customer expectations. All the activities in a BPM process are recorded and available for audit with the click of a button. When you seek executive buy-in for BPM projects, make sure you note the cost of fines, penalties, and the potential loss of business that can result from not adhering to these SLAs and regulations.
• Revenue: BPM is not just about saving money by making business processes more efficient—it is also about generating more revenue. With BPM you can bring new products and services to market faster and capture opportunities before your competitors do. For example, many organizations have fast-tracked new product introductions or streamlined clinical trials using BPM. Although these are industry-specific examples, any firm can improve the customer experience with contextual product and service offerings and see an immediate impact on the bottom line.

Video: Professor Rosemann of Queensland University of Technology discusses starting the BPM journey.

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Here are the six best practices you should consider when you start with your BPM initiative.

Visualize the End State

Once you have identified likely candidates for improvement, evaluate what impact that process has on your business. Determine the key metrics by which you will measure the performance of the process. Measure the current status of resource use, completion times, quality, cost, and SLAs. Research industry benchmarks for these performance metrics and set realistic goals for what you would like to achieve.

Empower Business Users

There are no IT projects, only business initiatives that need IT support. This philosophy reflects an important fact: Business people have the best handle on process-improvement initiatives. Make sure analysts and operations personnel have the right tools and training to design, modify, and improve the processes within their purview.

Enforce Standard Practices

To instigate a successful business process management program you must put the right methodology in place. If your organization has already adopted a proven methodology such as Six Sigma or Lean, leverage these assets and build on this base of experience. Define standards for modeling and creating processes and encouraging reuse. Document how processes should be modeled, analyzed, and approved, and define the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders. Establish governance procedures for change management, enforce change management processes for process versions and artifacts, and create a BPM Center of Excellence to guide the organization.

Business-Driven

Oracle BPM Suite is the industry's most complete and business-friendly BPM solution. It simplifies the design and implementation of all types of processes and workflows, empowering business users to take control of process-improvement initiatives. The suite includes all the technology you need to create, document, and modify business processes in a nontechnical manner, as well as implement, execute, and monitor end-to-end processes.

Oracle BPM Suite is built around a series of intuitive, GUI-based tools. For example, as shown in this video of a car booking scenario, the Business Process Composer feature makes it easy to define business processes that eliminate bottlenecks and optimize core business activities. In conjunction with IT professionals, business users can create rules to enforce business policies, define UI forms, discover business services, and incorporate business data to complete implementation.

Complete

Oracle BPM Suite can meet all your process needs: from simple to complex, from human processes to system processes, from highly structured activities to adaptive case management scenarios. It includes a unified process foundation that removes the complexity from process development, integration, deployment, monitoring, and execution.

Oracle's comprehensive BPM technology enables complete visibility into business processes, so analysts can predict, architect, and enable interactions through multiple channels and touchpoints.