Process Management...

From a BPM.com posting...

A business exists to provide value to customers in exchange for something else of value.  Process means a flow of business activities and seeing those activities as connected toward achievement of some business transaction.

I have said before that a business is a collection of processes.  Over simplified, those processes exist to provide goods or services to customers.  You get paid when you provide those goods or services to your customers.  You get repeat business when your customers are happy with their purchase.

This process [or collection of processes] is often referred to as the 'quote to collect' process.  It seems to me that this would be a good process to understand.

I see a couple of ways to look at this process: 

  1 - From an internal point of view

  2 - From your customer's point of view

Internal point of view: Look at the process to identify non-value add activities that are being performed; Look at the activities in each step to see if they can be improved; and look to see if there are some manual steps that could be performed by a computer.

Customer point of view: Talk with your customers to discover ways that you might improve your company's interaction with them.  A good example of this was Amazon's introduction of Amazon Prime.  Those of us that purchase from Amazon often have been given a very cool service - 2 day free shipping.  You probably only have to make 3 or 4 purchase a year for this to pay for itself.

How can you make life easier for your customer?

Don't forget that BPM is a discipline - it is something that you do.  BPM is not something that you do once and forget it.  It is an ongoing activity.

Start now to get ahead of your competition...