How to improve the organizations´ efficiency and the effectiveness by BPM technologies

Due to the competitive and changeable environment that organizations are facing nowadays it is necessary to maintain the concept of continuous improvement towards excellence. The organizations need to be agile and flexible in order to confront the continuous changes (changes in the costumers’ needs, in legislation, in available technology, in personnel etc.) and they should be efficient and effective if they want to consolidate their business for the long and mid-term.

This whitepaper will show how the BPM technologies offer a suitable motor to increase productivity and competitiveness levels in a continuous way, facilitating the adoption of a unified strategy for managing people, systems and content throughout the processes, which guarantee the improvement of efficiency and effectiveness.

We will also see, through real experiences, those key issues to consider in the process of implementing BPM solutions and technologies and making the expected efficiency and effectiveness to become realities.

Benefits of using a Master Data Management System

Master data management (MDM) comprises a set of processes and tools that consistently defines and manages the non-transactional data entities of an organization (also called reference data). MDM has the objective of providing processes consolidating, quality-assuring, persisting and distributing such data throughout an organization to ensure consistency and control in the ongoing maintenance and application use of this information.

There are several benefits of using a Master data Management System, also providing a data centric perspective governed by processes.

Processes´ Management and Enterprise Content Management

The ECM (Enterprise Content Management) technology has emerged in parallel with BPM (Business Process Management) technology. Although traditionally considered as additional tool, the truth is that it has always been used independently.

The latest market developments allow us to ensure that both technologies will work even more closely together, hand in hand, as the combination enables companies to generate higher returns by managing unified processes, people and content. The existing studies in this area are betting on an increase in both markets. Forrester forecasts an annual growth of 30% in the BPM environment, growing dramatically from 1,6 million US dollars in 2007 to 6,3 million US dollars by 2011. Estimates for content management and portals environment suggest a 20% growth rate. Together these applications and our ability to deliver them to the market gives us a winning business model.

Five key points for continuous improvement in the life-cycle of processes

In this document we will not discuss the multiple benefits of managing and automating processes or the importance of these steps in terms of improving competitiveness and business productivity. Neither will we look at software suites or applications. Instead we will focus on a number of key general points that should be taken into account by any organization, regardless of the sector in which it operates, that undertakes a project aimed at improving business processes.