The consultant
will work with the operational heads of the Enterprise
and carry out an audit of the current Business processes.
He will spot any bottlenecks, leaks and noises in
the process. The bottlenecks are obstacles in the
Business process, which make it less efficient or
slow it down. The leaks are responsible for loss
of information or management due to lack of proper
knowledge management. The noises introduce misinformation
or wrong information into the system, again due
to a lack of proper knowledge management.
The audit will also spot any in-efficiencies or
stages where the Enterprise is less effective and
the cause behind this low effectiveness. Based on
this insight new Business processes can be suggested
by the consultant. A BPA system will need to be
procured at this point to enable the Business processes.
There is a more conservative alternative. This is
to stick with the existing Business Processes and
make them faster using a BPA system to start with.
Once these systems are in place and the staff has
adapted to the new system the current Business process
and system can be evaluated together to spot what
areas are causing the bottlenecks. It becomes easier
to spot the real bottlenecks once the BPA system
is in place since there will be a lot of data on
the various stages of the Business process.
However, there is no simple answer to which alternative
is better. For smaller organizations where the
top management is closely interacting with the
line-managers & staff, it might be better to first
implement a BPA system and then tailor the Business
processes after obtaining live data. For larger
organizations the change management needs to be
handled in a very careful manner and the former
approach of Business Process Audits, Business
Process Automation needs to be followed.
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