Speed, customer satisfaction and lower cost through operations excellence are the essential factors for organizations that deliver products and services, with the aim to achieve and sustain superior shareholder returns in businesses and governmental enterprises. Service based organizations such as banking, insurance, retail, and government always drive towards prioritizing operational excellence as for these sectors so much of their costs are tied into operations. Analysis from Lean 6 Sigma consultants says that 30-80% of the costs in a service business are pure waste. Eliminating this waste can not only reduce costs, but more importantly allow a business to become faster and much more responsive to its customers, driving revenue growth. Companies and government agencies such as ALCAN, Department of Defence, Australian Federal Government Department of Navy, Australian Department of Education, Orica, Tyco Water, Invensys International, Westpac Banking Corporation, Queensland State Treasury, Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals, On Semiconductors have worked with Kirtland Leadership Pte. Ltd., the South Pacific and South East Asia representative, in the deployment and development of Lean 6 Sigma capability.
The traditional way to achieve the automatic execution of processes is that an application is developed or purchased which executes a portion of the overall process steps required in a business. Execution of a complete business process is achieved by using a patchwork of interfacing software with human intervention where automatic interface is not possible. Due to the complexity that this approach engenders, changing a process is costly and an overview of the processes and their state is difficult to obtain.
As a response, an extension of Business Process Optimization consulting has evolved to evaluate processes, technology, hardware and software. Business Process Optimization allows the full business process (as developed in the process design activity) to be defined in a computer language which can be directly executed by a hardware, software or an embedded firmware. The Business Process Optimization will either use services in connected applications to perform business operations (e.g. calculating a repayment plan for a loan) or will send messages to human workers requesting they perform certain tasks which necessitate a human attribute such as intuition as opposed to automated processes. As the process definition is directly executable, changes in the process can be (in comparison to the traditional approach of application development or maintenance) relatively quickly moved into operation. In order to work effectively a Business Process Optimization often requires that the underlying software is constructed according to the principles of a service-oriented architecture.
Business Process Optimization or BPO also encompasses the tracking of individual processes so that information on their state can be easily seen and the provision of statistics on the performance of one or more processes. An example of the tracking is being able to determine the state of a visitor entering a commercial facility through a visitor management system or digital video recording (e.g. time arrived, awaiting, meeting, exit) so that problems in its operation can be identified and corrected. In addition, this information can be used to work with customers, suppliers or even inter department to improve their connected processes. Examples of the statistics are the generation of measures on the number of people at a particular site, customer purchase and spending trends, peak demand location, favorite gaming machines. These measures tend to fit into three categories: cycle time, defect rate and productivity. Through the measures, the optimum design and process layout in the real world can be developed.
Business Process Optimization
Business Process Optimization is a process to handle the complex business policy of any organization. There are so many tools, hardware & software to handle this process and customize the already existing tools, nevertheless it is sometimes a real challenge to realize the complexity business process of an organization to automate.