Business Process Management – Now Boarding
Where I come from we use the word ‘tight’ to describe someone who is thrifty - the word is often used to poke gentle fun at friends or colleagues. Nowdays being careful with money has become sexy, with the weekend papers full of ways to beat the credit crunch, and 101 ways to survive a financial crisis. Suddenly managing the pennies is the new cool - well, maybe not cool, but certainly being aware of, and managing all the costs associated with your household or business is now a priority.
With this in mind I found renewed admiration for the low cost airlines when I took a short break last week (while reading the excellent Ruinair by Paul Kilduff). The low cost airline approach is to look at the basic processes which govern airline travel, and then look at ways to reduce costs, while maximising revenue. Thus it’s not unusual for the person who operates the check-in to also be doing the final gate check. Turnaround time is everything, and the target is to have the plane ready for the next flight within less than half an hour - that’s why they collect the trash while you are still on the plane, and some low cost airlines have even eliminated the seat-back pocket. To maximise revenue they sell every seat they can, and then when you are on-board you are bombarded with offers to buy food, beverages, perfumes, telephone cards and even lottery cards.
In the Business Process world, before we can help our partners and clients to improve an existing process, it’s often necessary to conduct a process discovery session, where we collaboratively sit down and capture the existing process. During this discovery meeting we work to associate time, costs and other attributes with each process step, and build up an overall picture of where time and money is being spent as the process executes in the real world. To be truly useful a BPM builder must be able to include both manual tasks and system tasks, since both are included in most real world processes. A builder which supports swimlane analysis and node sizing enables this information to be shown graphically.
Once this overall process map is built, the overall cost of one process execution can be estimated, and the next phase of engagement can begin - how to reduce costs, automate tasks where possible, and eliminate redundancy. This same information can also be used to build up overall service level agreements, measure productivity and report on agreed KPIs during process exection - all key considerations in the current economic climate.
So - well done to the budget airlines who have sorted their processes, and this allows you and I to take flights for the price of a concert ticket. (Now, if you are in Barcelona, I know this great place two of you can eat like kings for 14 Euro).
About the author: Manus Savage is the Partner Manager at Singularity, a leading BPM vendor (www.singularity.co.uk).
Tags: BPM, Business-Process, Process, Reduced-Costs, ROI