Enhanced business process management performance measures can be achieved through the Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) business management system.
Business Process Management (BPM) performance measurements are most effective when they are readily available and quantify process performance measurements at both the enterprise and operations level – from a process point of view. BPM with effective dashboards that provide automatically-updated predictive measurements, can prove to be very benefit to the leadership and business management of an organization as a whole.
In this blog, I will describe the benefits of an Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) BPM Performance Measurement approach for achieving the above desires.
Business Process Management Performance Measures: Types
The statement, ″Tell me how you will measure me and I will tell you how I will behave″ has much merit. This phrase should be considered to not only address what is being measured but how a BPM performance measurement is reported.
To address this point, consider the relationship Y=f(X). In this relationship, Y is the process output and X represents both the inputs to the process and the process itself. The process owner should have an invested interest in both measurements. The Y response is what is most visible to his/her management and others about his/her organization.
For a given process, there can be differing scenarios in how the process is viewed. Consider the following:
1. The output of one process could be an input to another process; i.e., one process is a supplier to another process.
2. The output of a process could be affected by how well rules are determined and executed in a process; e.g., timely addition of cashiers at a popular grocery store, when appropriate, to reduce customer wait time in a check-out line
Business Process Management Performance Measures: Outputs and Inputs
For the first situation described above, organizations benefit when they use 30,000-foot-level reporting for their BPM Performance Measurement to separate common-cause variability from special cause (Dr. Edwards Deming terminology) when examining the following:
- Output of a process (Y)
- Inputs to the process, if these inputs are a result of the output of another process; e.g., X´s to this process that affect the level of the process´ output performance
The determination of the most appropriate action plan for a given set of data depends upon how the process has performed recently relative to a statistical evaluation which considers performance variability. With 30,000-foot-level reporting, data are not reported in a timely fashion to ″control″ the process. Updates to a 30,000-foot-level chart may be daily, weekly, or monthly with this form of BPM Performance Measurement reporting system.
For the second described situation, measurements can be used to ″control″ the process. Unlike with 30,000-foot-level reporting, 50-foot-level metrics with a BPM Performance Metric reporting methodology need to create timely intervention when rules dictate action should be undertaken. Example situations for this scenario are:
- When should additional resources be added or taken away in a call center because of increased and reduced demand during the day for the purpose of having a reasonable call hold time; i.e., if too long customer is unhappy and too short would indicate that the company is encountering more expense when customer service agents spend a lot of time waiting for phone calls to occur?
- When should a manufacturing operation redress a grinding wheel because a certain level of wear has occurred, which could affect the quality of the manufacturing operation?
Both of these situations involve active control of the process to achieve a desired response from the process. Red-yellow-green dashboards following statistical pre-control techniques can be a good approach for tracking these process inputs to determine when intervention should be made. One should note for this form of 50-foot-level tracking what is to specifically done when an input response reaches a certain level needs to be known; e.g., add grocery-store checkers or redress the grinding wheel.
For important processes to the organization, these types of processes could be candidates for automation and/or redesign. An example of a process redesign and a form of automation for the customer check-out process in a grocery store is the implementation of self-check-out lines.
Business Process Management Performance Measures: Dashboards
With a BPM Performance Measurement IEE approach, 30,000-foot-level reporting is to be used in lieu of red-yellow-green dashboards. The reason for this is that stoplight scorecards can lead to much firefighting common-cause variability as though it were special cause.
Automatic updated predictive scorecard dashboards can be generated using Enterprise Performance Reporting System (EPRS) software.
Contact Us to set up a time to discuss with Forrest Breyfogle how your organization might gain much from an Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) approach for enhancing its business process management performance measures.