Business process improvement (BPI) aims at improving the effectiveness, efficiency and adaptability of the day-to-day business operation. BPI initiatives that focus on individual business function ignoring the end-to-end business process may end up having detrimental effect on the overall business performance. In addition, it is not uncommon to see BPI projects running in isolation to other business and technology transformation efforts. Such BPI initiatives could achieve short term improvement but a challenge to maintain and sustain continuous process improvement in the organization. The adoption of business process management (BPM), a collection of methods, policies, metrics, roles and technologies, is critical both as an operational and technology strategies to meet the dynamic environments business is in today. These methods, policies, metrics, roles and technologies can be grouped into four key categories of building blocks for adopting BPM – organisational transformation, process improvement, performance measurement, and BPM technologies. As building blocks, they are interdependent and work in synergy. This article explore one of these building blocks, the process improvement methods and the challenges.

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