Business Process Modeling

Business Process Modeling or BPM as it is often referred to as, is closely related to Enterprise Architecture because everything an organization does is executed via business processes. Many Enterprise Architecture issues are traceable to ailing business processes. Incomplete or inconsistent business processes lead to business pains when it comes to service delivery and meeting an organization’s overall goal (often referred to as the Mission, expressed in an organization’s Mission Statement).

Business process modeling involves identifying an organization’s business processes and establishing their relationships, and how they contribute to an organization’s overall goal. Business Process Modeling projects often include Business Process Problem Solving sub-projects, which identify the causes of any problems affecting business processes. 

Business Process Modeling, however, go beyond documenting business processes and streamlining them to remove inefficiencies in their execution. It also involves Business Process Optimization or Business Process Maximization, which involves the simulation of the execution of the streamlined and modeled business processes in order to establish the adjustments that would be required in the operations of an organization in order to archive a particular output level. This is what is referred to as Business Process Engineering. 

The software used to simulate business process execution provides a laboratory platform for experimenting with adjustments to business processes execution in order to establish the resource levels and controls that need to be put in place in order to achieve optimal or maximum output from the collective interaction of the business processes. We use System Dynamics tools to achieve this, and save organizations the costs and pains associated with experimenting with actual resource acquisition and adjustments to their operations in attempts to optimize or maximize their output. Instead, we do this on a computerized laboratory platform which enables us to experiment with diverse resources levels and varied controls in the form of Stock-and-Flow processes, until we achieve the required adjustments. We then advise the enterprise on the correct adjustments to make in the operations in order to achieve their desired output levels.

Our Business Process Modelling engagements assist organizations to model their business processes and establish the bottlenecks affecting the smooth execution of each of the affected business processes.

Our Business Process Engineering engagements assist organizations to either optimize or maximize their output given the finiteness of specific resources, which our customers indicate should not be adjusted in order to avoid extra capital or operational expenditure. This leads to optimized or maximized output from the streamlined business processes without new CaPex or OpEx spending, or with some CaPex or OpEx spending depending on the financial conditions provided by the customer.

This largely explains why, being process-oriented, our ICT division does not just provide ICT tools and technologies. Rather, we provide only the specific building blocks required to enable an enterprise to drive the execution of its streamlined business processes with no wastage in the form of extra, unnecessary ICT spending.