The ability to respond rapidly to change has become critical to success for businesses today. The requirement for swift flexibility is driven by factors such as ever-changing customer demands and new regulatory and compliance conditions.
One of the latest ways of ensuring and embedding speed of processing and flexibility into organisations is via Business Process Management (BPM). Fundamentally, BPM has the theoretical basis that even though most information technology systems are designed to manipulate data rapidly and flexibly, it is only true as long as processes involved are accurately modelled and remain static. In practice, however, business processes change continuously at an ever-increasing pace. BPM aims to provide businesses with the capacity to deal with this quandary.
BPM systems focus on enabling business processes themselves to be stored and handled as if they were data. These systems can then be used to integrate legacy applications, construct or deconstruct processes or link web services together.
PricewaterhouseCoopers provides BPM-related services in conjunction with selected vendors of leading BPM software. PricewaterhouseCoopers' strong experience in process analysis, design and improvement are combined with the functionality of mature BPM products to provide clients with the optimum solutions for improving the efficiency of business processes.
Services include:
- Process design and development
- Process modelling
- Process analysis
- Process simulation
- Process testing
Through alliances with leading BPM software vendors, PricewaterhouseCoopers combines the processing speed and flexibility offered by BPM products to develop the best possible process solutions for clients, catering for a wide range of drivers from increased visibility and controls to the need for processing efficiency and effective workflow. In addition, BPM aims to close gaps in process cycle times, integration and automation that are left by typical ERP applications.
BPM systems and tools are typically intended for use by non-technical managers who create process designs and/or changes at a high level, often using graphical representations. These designs are then translated and mapped into the software at lower levels where the process management and workflow are handled.
