How To Monitor Multi-System Business Processes
Organizations use processes to manage their business. How each process gets implemented falls into four main categories.
- Paper-based
- Email + Spreadsheet
- Multiple Systems
- BPM Software
Organizations have invested a lot of time and money in processes that fall into category 3. Bringing all those processes into a BPMS is not an easy or quick job. I have seen a single process that goes through 20+ systems from start to end.
Let's take an example of order fulfillment, a fairly common process. The diagram below shows lifecycle of an order as it moves through various systems. Most of the times you will find core business of an organization distributed into multiple systems in a similar manner. Work, of course, gets done, but at any given time you cannot find exactly what is the current status of the process. And to generate even simple reports, data first needs to be consolidated from all the systems manually or through some sort of batch job.
So, how do you monitor a process that resides in multiple systems and ensures that it is running optimally considering it does not provide a single view. You build a shadow process.
The idea of shadow process is simple; you design the end to end process with all major milestones without actually implementing all the functionality in a BPMS.
Implementation Steps
Here are high-level steps for implementing a monitoring system using shadow processes.
- Define process with major milestones
- Level of milestone granularity is directly proportional to effort required
- Use milestones that make sense for reporting
- Find a common id that will allow you to uniquely identify an instance of the process in all systems
- Build services that either receives events from external systems or fetch data from external systems
- Build services that advance the process instance based on event data
- Log key event data e.g. instance id, business data, start time and end time etc. These can then be used by any reporting tool to generate meaningful insights
Compared to implementing all the processes in a BPMS, this type of monitoring solutions is much quicker to implement, provide end to end process view and helpful insights for future optimization.
How To Improve Business Processes Using Process Monitoring
Note: This article was originally published on my previous blog ProcessRamblings.com.
Process discovery and automation are first steps towards a continuous journey of improvement. Beginning this journey is important for any organization, staying on the right path and knowing what the journey is all about is even more important.
So how do you know you are on the right path? You continuously monitor your processes!
Monitoring Matters!
Why Monitor?
At the time of designing (and probably automation) process might look good and complete without issues. In reality, some new issues, bottlenecks and/or opportunities might arise. You will not be able to resolve them or take advantage of opportunities unless you monitor the process.
Monitoring generates metrics, which are used to evaluate the process on regular basis. These metrics answer questions like:
- Is the process working as per expectations?
- Is it meeting (preferably exceeding) internal and industry standards.
Metrics also become the basis for further redesign and improvement of the process. Which of course results in automation opportunities that can further cut down on cycle times and defects.
Monitoring helps in identifying areas of the process that have improved and areas that still need more attention. Based on this information you can better utilize organization resources by reassigning/reallocating to under performing areas.
What to Monitor?
Process performance indicators are identified during the design phase. There are thousands of performance indicators available that can be monitored for each process. Some of them are relatively similar across industries and then there are industry specific performance indicators. Performance Indicators broadly fall into following categories:
- Financial Performance
- Understand your Customers
- Market and Marketing Efforts
- Operational Performance
- Understand your Employees and their Performance
- Environmental and Social Sustainability Performance
How to Monitor?
If you use a Business Process Management Software (BPMS) to automate your process, then some basic performance indicators would already be built into them. For additional custom performance indicators, you can use a Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) software.
References
- The 75 KPIs Every Manager Needs To Know by Bernard Marr.
- Images courtesy to openclipart.org
Republished/Cited
- Article republished on BPMLeader.com
- Article cited by Scott Cleveland