Business Process Management Center

USING SMARTDRAW FOR BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Putting aside the latest buzzwords and fads, the ultimate goal of any business is to maximize profits. By documenting and improving processes, your businesses can reduce costs and waste, and increase productivity, customer satisfaction, and revenues. Whether you want to improve your hiring process or speed up your assembly line, applying Business Process Management strategies will help you achieve your goals by documenting, analyzing, and optimizing your critical processes.

What is a Business Process?
Every business relies on a set of activities or processes that allow it to function. A manufacturing business obtains raw materials, creates a product, and delivers that product to customers. A service business hires the right service providers, trains them, and sends them out to serve customers. Countless business processes within each organization carry these operations forward smoothly, and when all goes well, profitably.

Processes can be analyzed at different levels, from the small (how should a cook grill a burger?) to the enterprise-wide (how should our organization route internal communications?)

Frequently, processes are grouped for analysis by department or division:

• Procurement: Obtain resources and materials
• Product development: Plan, design, and refine goods and services
• Production: Manufacture and provide goods or services
• Delivery: Receive, fulfill, and track shipments
• Accounting: Track financial transactions and investments
• Human Resources: Hire employees, manage benefits and payroll
• Marketing: Promote goods and services
• Customer Service: Answer questions and solve customer problems

Why Actively Manage Processes?
Why not just solve problems as they arise? Why spend the time and money to analyze processes that seem to be working? The answer is that active, methodical Business Process Management can identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies that are invisible to the organization—and it can find room for improvement even in well-refined procedures.

Pro-actively managing business processes can help your organization:

• Eliminate flaws
• Reduce the time spent on a specific task
• Decrease costs
• Decrease resources associated with any task
• Improve efficiency
• Improve overall quality
• Increase customer and employee satisfaction