Retailers around the world are at in important inflection point. Pressure emanating from the global economic downturn has only exacerbated an already tough, competitive environment. Retailers are making business decisions today that will have far-reaching ramifications. It is clear that those that identify how to increase information technologies' impact on business performance, reducing costs and increasing revenue, will have a tactical and strategic advantage.
Today, organizations are taking advantage of the "real time" availability of electronic events, and using event processing technology to both improve operational business efficiency, and drive business optimization – instrumenting and analyzing business activity to drive decisions radically more transparently and efficiently.
The glory days seem far behind as stock prices fall, retail sales plummet, budgets are cut and global markets struggle. Both businesses and government organizations are looking for ways to dramatically reduce costs, do more with less and basically just survive the economic storm.
Most companies are using what seems to be a logical approach – cut, cut, cut. Cut people, cut budgets, cut travel, switch to lower cost suppliers – anything that results in an immediate reduction to expenses.
Strong, visible sponsorship is essential for an initiative of this nature to succeed – you will require time and effort from a large number of people across the business. This weekly meeting creates a definite time commitment on the executive’s schedule, keeps them engaged, and is essential to the initiative’s success. Each week, you will get push back from groups who are busy "fighting fires" and may not want to prioritize your process documentation initiative. Utilize this meeting to place executive pressure on those groups to ensure commitment is kept.
IBM BPM BlueWorks is cloud-based community with resources to help business leaders link strategy and execution. Users can tap into content and tools that support any stage of process analysis — from learning about BPM to collaborating with the community, experiencing BPM and optimizing processes. At each stage, users have access to pre-built BPM content, processes and contributions from BPM experts and users worldwide. BPM BlueWorks is available at no-cost, making it easy for any business to get started with BPM.
Enterprise cannot thrive and compete without objective standard metrics measuring its performance. After all, if metrics are not objective, they are of no use at all. This statement sounds like an axiom. Not for everybody, though.
Lean Six Sigma and business process management have much in common. Both methodologies use iterative improvement and design techniques to deliver financial and performance benefits through better managed and optimized processes. Download this free comprehensive 52 page IBM Redguide to:
- Realize the value of business process management
- Understand how SOA enables BPM and Lean Six Sigma
- Learn about the think big, start now steps
The biggest challenge with starting a process improvement initiative lies in understanding existing processes and knowing where to start. The traditional approach involves significant investment in time and resources to map out processes the outcome of which is often delayed and inaccurate. Read how Fujitsu's Automated Process Discovery Service helps companies:
If you are an architect responsible for a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in an enterprise, you face many challenges. Whether intended or not, the architecture you create defines the structure of your enterprise at many different levels, from business processes down to data storage. It defines the boundaries between organizational units as well as between business systems. Your architecture must go beyond defining services and provide practical solutions for a host of complex distributed system design problems, from orchestrating business processes to ensuring business continuity.
More and more companies are documenting their internal business processes. The purpose of the documentation process is not merely having some background information on the way of working, but to have a reliable view on the actual situation in order to be able to identify potential structural shortcomings and inefficiencies. The process modeling outcome is in many cases used for business process improvement, or process optimization.