“The management drive is the support and commitment of a company’s senior management, at the time to think and take the first and last step in a BPM tool process automation. This is the fourth pillar of importance for macro phases: process modelling, process construction testing, adjustments and/or changes to business rules. Process implementation in a run-time environment and the actors involved, as well as the post implementation of any implementation of automated process”
If your business wants to increase efficiency, (time and costs) by automating business processes in a BPM tool, it is required that safe and timely decisions take place by upper management. The upper management of the company must establish their commitment and support at all implementation phases of the automated processes. How? Upper management from pre-evaluation of the expert technical staff must decide which process “may” be automated and also determine the impact it will have on the business. Although any process can be automated through a BPM tool, the most important thing is if the process works for the business and the users feel the improvement, instead of obstacles in their job performance. This makes it necessary to choose a critical business process. It must have acceptable levels of maturity to carry on with the automation changes. Using information technologies that were operative will cause less impact on the business continuity. The business is not stopped by the complexity using a BPM tool, culture of information technology or by a simple decision of the end user.
Having decided the critical process/processes be automated together with experts skilled in processes automation through a BPM tool, the business must define project leaders that will guide the experts on processes automation during the implementation. This will assure the successful implementation of the Process.
The project leaders will be composed of current employees. These employees must have experience working in areas where automation is carried out. Also, they need to be able to determine with the experts the information flow, the information to be introduced, the exceptions, the performance of the information flow, the formalization of control within the process and who will be precursors of process automation in the company. Additionally, the formation of this team leader should be embodied by the upper management as a motivation activity for the employee and thus no additional workload. Their assignment must be evaluated and designed under the concept “motivation”. A bad leader will undermine the whole project.
The time chart of the experts on processes automation should be closely related to meetings with the project leaders. These leaders will determinate the way of the Process automation. This will strengthen its abstraction for the automation through a BPM tool. The initial meetings with team leader must be carried out to inform employees about the advantages of using a BPM tool. This meeting includes details on the BPM tools strengths, the resources required by the experts and time chart of the proposed work. Any meeting must be formally documented and filed in the project folder in order to expose it to upper management and as a physical back up of the establishments made in the meeting. Additionally, the meeting must be established with the team leader, experts and upper management for an exposition of the results during the implementation assumed as a business.
The team leader and management support that must be shown by the senior management to end users needs to be constant at key phases of the implementation. These phases are as follows: identification of critical process, beginning/initial testing, pilot implementation testing, starting and monitoring. The involvement of senior management at key phases mentioned above must be perceived by end users, since they are the main actors and promoters for a successful automation through the use of automated process in the BPM tool. If end users perceive the management’s commitment, the importance and the objectives pursued by the company, its interest will increase, and it will support automation project success. A tool to strengthen the user commitment is socialization trainings about advantages by using a BPM tool; it will minimize the reaction to change using technology information for activities that these users were accustomed to make operationally.
In conclusion to face solutions projects of automated processes and sustain them in the medium-term (due to the dynamic nature of a process), the four pillars exposed should exist implicitly:
- “Pillar One,” the level of process maturity as an important factor for the Processes automation.
- “Pillar Two,” the formal definition of the processes to be automated.
- “Pillar Three,” the Organizational Culture for processes automation.
- “Pillar Four,” the Managerial Support for Processes Automation, or the strengthen work on them in order to successfully realize any implementation of an automated process through a BPM tool.
