Key Benefits of Business Process Modeling

In April, I (David, 26*) joined edorasware, representing a business sector I’m experienced in that I believe will offer new challenges with a new team and different culture, which I expect will end up being a very enriching experience for me.

When I arrived, I received a really warm welcome and quickly adapted to the new environment. So far, I am proud to be part of a team where quality assurance really matters and every idea is taken into account, allowing me to truly have the possibility to make an impact.

I’m confident that the increasing talent pool and great potential of its main products — edoras one and, in particular, the latest addition, Flowable — are key factors that can position edorasware as one of the most innovative companies in Business Process Modeling (BPM) for years to come.

For me, as an industrial engineer with a background in business processes improvement and a passion for coding at the same time, it is incredibly rewarding to work as a developer in the overlapping area between business and IT, which deals with automating work and simplifying things by using IT, providing business solutions to different sectors. Here is where Business Process Modeling is of great relevance, and that is why, in this post, I will describe some key benefits of this practice and then present my experience at edorasware with regard to these advantages.

Business Process Modeling is a combination of various process-related steps — such as process mapping, process discovery, process simulation, process analysis, and process improvement — aimed at improving business performance by optimizing the efficiency of connecting activities in the provision of a product or service.

BPM has emerged during the last few decades and has replaced previous organizational efficiency practices, such as the Time and Motion Study (TMS) and Total Quality Management (TQM).

Following are some of the key advantages BPM allows you to achieve.

1. Align operations with business strategy

Implementing a business strategy or new business model requires changes in the operations and in how people perform their work.

Business process modeling facilitates this by helping managers and executives ensure that business processes are consistent, and enable business execution toward achieving the overall strategy and goals of the organization.

2. Improve process communication

Having a very clear idea of what should be done, how it is supposed to be done, and what the exact role of every team member entails, represents key factors that lead businesses and teams to success.

Business process modeling enables the documentation and communication of an organization’s business processes. It provides a common, unified language and methodology for communicating processes, information and guidelines about the processes; it minimizes the loss of business process knowledge (for example, as a result of a loss of staff); jumpstarts the organizational process documentation initiative; and, allows for rapid knowledge transfer with thoroughly documented processes.

3. Increase control and consistency

Successful companies and organizations also attach high importance to well-designed business processes and rules to ensure that they are consistently applied the same way every single time.

Business Process Modeling makes this possible, as it provides the formalization of existing processes that may not be well-documented, eliminates guesswork, and ensures that these documented processes follow the company guidelines and legal regulations.

4. Improve operational efficiencies

The process simulation and analysis steps of BPM provide understanding of the process flows and helps managers determine if there is room for further optimization, improving the process cycle time, enabling better resource utilization, and allowing modeling of the process before actually implementing it, thus minimizing disruptions.

5. Gain competitive advantage

All the benefits mentioned above lead to a significant competitive advantage for an organization that has invested the time and effort to document, simulate, constantly refine, and improve its business processes.

A business that has aligned its operations with its strategy, is agile, has control over its processes, runs efficiently, and has a well-trained staff, is likely to be performing at its best.

At edorasware, I have the opportunity to learn from many colleagues who are experienced developers or business analysts through a collaboration platform used to create, organize, and discuss work. This is actually a very useful documentation practice that provides employees with coding guidelines (for example, how to deal with error logging) — information on how to set up a programming environment or how to create a branch from a master project within others — avoiding loss of knowledge and increasing consistency.

Business analysts and requirements engineers are responsible for gathering and negotiating the requirements of the client: splitting this whole package into dif-ferent tasks that would then be performed by the developers, who are responsible for developing, testing, and documenting the tasks performed, following a documented task lifecycle. Afterwards, the work is evaluated by all team members to assure code quality and consistency. While business process modeling relates to many aspects of management (business, organization, profit, change, projects, and so on), its detailed technical nature and process-emphasis links it closely with quality management and the analytical approaches and responsibilities arising in the improvement of quality.

As a team, we also put heavy emphasis on effective communication by implementing team-focused approaches such as Scrum, which provides a framework for continual feedback and exposure to make sure that quality is as high as possible, improving progress visibility and increasing project control.

Put simply, business process modeling aims to improve business performance by optimizing the efficiency of connecting activities in the provision of a product or service.

*About the author:

Name: David Santiago

Education: Industrial Engineering, Universidade de Vigo (Spain)

Start at edorasware ag: 18/04/2017

Title: Full stack developer

Projects: eDiscovery (Finance)