BPMInstitute.org defines Business Process Management as the definition, improvement and management of a firm’s end-to-end enterprise business processes in order to achieve three outcomes crucial to a performance-based, customer-driven firm: 1) clarity on strategic direction, 2) alignment of the firm’s resources, and 3) increased discipline in daily operations.

BPM is an enterprise-wide, structured approach to providing the products and services that your customer’s value most.  It is grounded in the premise that you must take a process view of your company in order to understand what products and services your customer values most.  By understanding the key business processes your company uses to meet these customer needs, the gap between customer expectations and your ability to perform begins to emerge.

Amateur golfers know how hard it is to get a consistent, repeatable, powerful golf swing. In golf, as in BPM, there’s no shortage of advice. Many experts agree that the essence of a consistent, repeatable, powerful golf swing has much to do with weight transfer, shoulder turn, swinging on plane, follow through, and balance. The same principles apply to BPM. So let’s explore why golfers should be adept at BPM.

When you get started in BPM, the first step invariably is documenting your current, or as-is, process. You can gather the facts from process participants and process owners in a variety of ways – in a group, putting yellow stickies on the wall, or in separate interviews. But eventually you face the challenge of reducing that collected knowledge into a structured, semantically precise yet intuitively understandable, diagram – a process model.

The majority of process “models” in the wild are simply Visio diagrams, applying shapes and lines as the individual modeler sees fit.

Introduction:  Seldom a hot topic now, quality was the holy grail for business fifteen to twenty years ago. At the time, the automotive industry was learning the hard way from Japan that buyers could recognize quality and appreciate it enough to make it a priority in choice-making. The lesson was largely framed through the lens of manufacturing and the concepts of quality control developed by Edwards Demming – a prophet embraced by the Japanese, ignored in America and, suddenly, as important at home as he was abroad.