Continuous Improvement

Due to the changing and competitive environment that organizations face today it is necessary to keep alive the concept of continuous improvement towards excellence. Organizations need to be agile and flexible to handle the continuous changes such as changing customer’s needs, the laws applicable in the technology available, the staff, etc. and should be effective and efficient in order to build their business in the medium and long time.

The business and technology layers must be able to join efforts in the search for optimization by a common language and goals.

BPM technologies offer the best engine to increase the levels of productivity and competitiveness continuously, facilitating the adoption of a unified strategy to manage people, systems and content through the processes, which ensures the efficiency and effectiveness, and provides the agility and flexibility.

An organization, using a BPM suite, can implement the next cycle of continuous improvement in a simple way:

1. Identify the processes with more potential for improvement for the organization. The priority candidates are those that have bigger potential to increase the productivity of the organization, and can be easily automated. Choose one of them.
2. Design and model the process. A good design will make the process efficient and easy to deploy. The tool that enables this is a graphical process modeler, for example, from a graphical notation such as BPMN.
3. Run the process. A processes execution engine coordinates all activities of final users and of information systems involved. During the execution, it stores all the information for later analysis.
4. Track the results, through the display, in real time, of the information gathered during the execution of processes. Some of this information can be incorporated with an Intelligence Business system.
5. Optimize processes. Now, with all information gathered during the process implementation, you can identify opportunities for improvement, which will be implemented in a fast way, thanks to the facilities provided by the software. Then return to Step 1-identification of new processes or at 2-incremental improvement of existing processes, closing the circle.

The result of the implementation of this whole cycle of continuous processes improvement is the optimization of performance and control over the organization, in a gradual and controlled way.