What is process management pdf

BPM can deliver in all four of these areas. When a computer takes care of much of the work, its complexities are encoded and hidden from the worker, thus training time is reduced.

By automating tasks, BPM tools effectively outsource the work to computer rather than to an offshore company. The benefits of automation Automation promises us many great things that people are not very good at. When asked to do the same task repeatedly, the human mind will introduce variety where none is required. We can get sums wrong, we can read and write numbers and names wrong.

We can forget, ignore, put off, dream and chat when we have more important callings. Little change will come from focusing on the variety; it has been necessary in our ability to adapt and evolve; it is part of our nature. We are not good at repeating things.

Machines, on the other hand, can do little else. Once people are freed of their monotonies, they can begin to interact with other people in a meaningful, value adding way, rather than hurrying through their list of things to do under the watchful eye of efficiency. The stick is that if you do not automate, business will become ever more complex and more costly. Then the needs grew and changed. We redeveloped our IT systems, but they fell ever more short of goal, and more worker time, knowledge and effort was required to fill the gap between fast growing business requirements, and slower growing system abili- ties.

More people doing more work under more pressure results in more difficulty, more mis- takes and more layers of supervision. The obvious solution is to write newer applications to better meet the new requirements.

The hope is to plug the gap; the reality is that more people are needed to write and support more systems. Such thinking leads to an explosion of systems and support staff. The problem is expounded by acquisitive companies. They have bought up other compa- nies' system explosions and need to reduce the amalgamated burden.

Four factors determine how many workers an organization must employ to perform a task: 1. The number of people required to do the work 2. The number of people required to support the systems 4. The amount of work the systems can remove from the people Figure 1. Dynamic model of costs as new systems are introduced The scenario represented by figure 2 is as follows: Long ago, a system was developed to support a business process. Over the years, the increasing requirements of the business were filled partially by redeveloping the software and partially by hiring manpower to manually do what the system could not.

A new system intended to replace the old system was introduced. It was far more capable than the old system, and all new work was moved to it. Immediately, worker numbers were reduced and helpdesk numbers fell proportionately. The savings were partially offset by the new system administrators and training required on the new system, but once it was up and running, the cost savings would be fully realised when the old system was decommissioned.

But decommissioning is often an extremely difficult thing to do. In the end, the old system was left running to handle the cases which remained on it. As with the old system, the new one gradually fell ever shorter of the requirements placed upon it. Workers increased. The decision was made to automate the process. A single process running in a BPM environment would do most of the work and communicate with the newer legacy system where all data would be maintained.

More system administrators were required, but less workers and support staff when the automated system went live. This is an illustrative example of what might happen. Our once-manual rating meth- ods are more consistent and we were able to re-deploy 30 percent of our staff to other areas of the business.

To understand how automation is achieved, we must first consider the terms being used by the vendors of BPM software, and examine how people do their work. Business Processes Management Terms This section defines and highlights the relationships between terms.

Figure 3. Neural Network Real or virtual devices, inspired by neural structures, in which several interconnected elements process information simultaneously, adapting and learning from past patterns Orchestration Automated processes are triggered events or started at predefined times.

Orchestration is used to describe the tightly or loosely coupled mechanism which coordinates this across the enterprise or in a particular layer Pattern Recognition The basis of all recognition voice, handwriting, face etc. Patterns are identified in streams of data and matched against those on record or learned and recognized by neural nets. Process Flow The detailed flow of a business activity, e. Business Activity Monitoring Monitoring the business activities of individuals and groups Service Oriented Architecture An architecture in which applications are exposed as sets of services Web Service A software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network.

It has an interface described in a machine- processable format specifically WSDL. Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP- messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards Enterprise Application It is difficult to automate without some form of enterprise wide integration. To be processed in a timely manner, the workflow must be contained within a transaction, and the transaction requires messaging across a network of people to function.

Messaging The means of coordinating the transactions Network The medium through which the messages move Table 2. The work stack We are not software structures We work concurrently.

We collaborate, sharing unstructured and structured information. We do not always follow the predefined logic, often doing things differently or in a different order to those around us.

Software, on the other hand, is a sequence of hard coded steps based on Boolean logic. We have traditionally programmed our processes into our software, each one at a time, which is why our costs are high, and changes difficult. BPM software attempts to enable changes in process to keep track with changes in the business environment. This is the fundamental difference between process software and all other software. We have shifted a level of abstraction above program, to process. In doing so, writing software becomes a process configuration exercise, more uniform, and easier to rework.

Thus, BPM attempts to remove software production from the critical path of business change, while reducing costs. BPM Products To truly replicate the roles people have in business, an automation tool must be a master of the top 5 layers of the work stack in table 2. Whether it also provides all of the nuances of other programming languages depends upon the product, its intended uses and its maturity. A BPM product is a programming tool created to model and run business processes.

This can be overlooked in the analyst as programmer approach to process automation. Modern programming languages provide much more than the basic constructs. A reasonable list might be sequence, conditional branching, structured loops, con- current threads, inter-thread communication and synchronization, instance initialization, manipulation of variables and data types, throwing and catching ex- ceptions, waiting on a lock and resuming afterwards, testing a predicate on several fields, logical and math operations, subprogram calls, and assigning and freeing up storage, software and hardware resources.

Two industry bodies support BPM. Some vendors use BPML in their products, but it is far from universal. The so-called pure play vendors are under pressure from products reaching in from established operators in the related fields of document management, enterprise applica- tion integration EAI , and from ERP leaders.

Many vendors claim to be the leader in the field, but this is confused by a number of factors, including exactly how the market is defined, and without anyone publishing the indicators by which they claim to lead.

BPM offerings are part programming language, part operating environment and part per- son replacement. Despite the array of advanced technologies available, those that employ No. The leaders have products based on workflow, rules engines and process flow. Some automation products use Java or a bespoke language to create their process flows. Others use graphical techniques or flowcharts so that analysts can model rather than having coders code. There are two major features to a BPM product: the design time, and the run time environ- ments.

A mechanism for viewing the activity of the engine must be available for monitoring and support. Workflow management, depending upon its sophistication, allows managers to view the current and historic load on any worker, and reassign work from one worker to another. Dependencies A BPM solution is usually dependent on external systems for integration with legacy sys- tems and access security.

Comparing and Selecting a BPM product To compare BPM products is an extremely difficult task due to unfamiliarity with the me- dium, the vendors, and the wealth of products all appearing to do the same thing. It is rarely as simple as removing the people whose work has been replaced by machine. The list above is a simplified set of questions. Automation Oriented Architecture Two goals of BPM are to do the work that people normally do, and to enable the rapid change of business processes in an agile environment.

The enterprise architecture must facilitate these goals. In this section, we look at an enterprise architecture designed to support BPM, under the name Automation Oriented Architecture. It is a layered construct with three areas of con- cern, where each area is the focus of a different field of expertise.

AOA - The big picture The 11 layers of AOA Business focused AOA - Automation, business processes and business services In the business layers, the workers, supervisors and business analysts are concerned with the services the business provides, and how those services are delivered by proc- esses and workflows. The analyst further defines this into how the flow might be automated and orchestrated.

Automation Here sits the automaton human, software or both running through a defined business process. When developing automation functions, it is important from a business point of view to focus on the benefits derived e.

There is a great temptation when creating automation solutions to re-engineer the busi- ness processes at the same time. A full re-engineering effort followed by automation will result in statements like "if we knew that beforehand, we wouldn't have re-engineered it that way.

In this context, processing comprises workflow, work procedures, business rules, data defi- nitions and presentation of information to workers and their supervisors. Business Service Services are the core activities of the business.

They are the corporate raison d'etre, and held as tasks and processes on paper, in software, and in the hive mind. The business leaders and BPM champions will focus on the business services to identify what will be automated and when, and what the likely benefits will be.

Development focused AOA - Integration, software services, applications and frame- works The role of development in automation solutions is to provide the environment in which the analyst can automate. Developers are not concerned with flows, user interfaces or business logic, but with providing interfaces between the automation software and the legacy or back office systems.

Integration An enterprise automating manual and paper based tasks will be relatively rare. In most cases, some form of integration to legacy systems is required. If integration is being built as part of the BPM project, it will prove challenging as both are complex undertakings.

I have a new order, rather than System X: I have a new order No. Internal integration allows an automator to work on a task regardless of where or how the data representing it is held. It covers some or all of the integration items listed above. External integration boils down to a four function subset of internal integration, providing addressing, authentication, translation and transformation.

Incoming message struc- tures rarely match the internal business representation. Transformation and translation services convert an external format into an internal format, and vice-versa. Software services These are the services of Service Oriented Architecture. Each application is exposed to other applications as sets of services. A service typically allows any application to read and write blocks of data and exposes applications' internal functions.

Within the service, business rules may be applied to the data, which may, in turn, be supplied by another service. Most services are of the form create, read, update, delete, search or read and lock any item of business relevance. For example, create sales order, delete customer or read report X12 are services. In a pure service oriented architecture, everything is a service. A service may be required to discover which services are to be used within a given process.

Imagine the following scenario: A new request for an insurance quote comes in. The vehicle is a Volvo FH A human operator might pull out a Volvo brochure, or look in some lists or on the internet to find out that this particular model is a 6x2 axled artic, and needs to be processed by the team at Leeds on the commercial vehicles system. A taxonomy is a system of classification, and would classify the processing mechanism and computer system for each type of vehicle, and also the classification for each particu- lar model.

Applications Applications are anything installed on desktops and servers such as analysis tools, financial systems, ERP systems, search engines, web servers, databases, email serv- ers etc.

To make use of these applications, they must be exposed to outside use. The most common form of exposure is through software services or web services. Other forms of exposure are published APIs or screen scraping for mainframe applications.

Frameworks The frameworks provide shared services to applications. Reuse should occur at this low level, rather than expecting it to occur at the application level. There are many frameworks available these days, providing abstractions and services to what lies beneath.

Some come with purchased applications, other are. Many internal software development teams have created their own frameworks. Each technology and piece of hardware utilised must be carefully monitored to maintain the flow.

Broken flow will create backlogs and blockages, the freeing of which IT support must expedite. Hardware Servers, networks devices, wires, radio links, laptops, phones, PDAs, routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers etc. Some use http, others such as the UK national lottery use X. In the murky world of aged legacy systems RS may be the only option.

This section lists how each layer is managed, monitored, and what management information MI it will provide. Are services running? What ran when, what was What is blocked? Business processes Do it this way. What's going on? Who is How many did we do this doing it? How long is it month? Business services This is what we do Which are active, passive? What provides our income, What is taking the most profit? Internal integration What talks to what What is talking?

What talked? Software services What can call what What gets called, what are Service hits, exceptions response speeds? More so, success requires that management be both effective and efficient. Therefore, it needs to not only accomplish those goals and objectives, but do it in a way that the cost of accomplishment is viable for the company. He concluded that managers perform 10 different roles, which are highly interrelated.

Management roles refer to specific categories of managerial behavior. Overall there are ten specific roles performed by managers which are included in the following three categories.

Some of the ten roles do not fall clearly into one of the four functions, since all managers do some work that is not purely managerial. Challenges for Management Understanding organizational behavior has never been more important for managers. Take a quick look at the dramatic changes in organization. The typical employee is getting older; more women and people of color are in the workplace; corporate downsizing and the heavy use of temporary workers are serving the bond of loyalty that tied many employees to their employers, and global completion requires employees to become more flexible and cope with rapid change.

In this session we review some most of the critical issues confronting managers for which OB offers or at least meaningful insight towards solutions. Anybody can run a company when a business is booming because the difference between good and bad management reflects between making a lot of money and making a lot more today. When times are bad, who are asked to make due with less, and who worry about their futures. The difference between good and bad management can be difference between profit and loss or, ultimately, between survival and failure.

The world has become a global village. To work effectively with people from different cultures, you need to understand how their culture, geography, and religion have shaped them and how to adapt your management style to their differences. In a global economy, jobs tends to flow where lower costs gives businesses a comparative advantages, though labor groups, politicians and local community leaders see the exporting of jobs as undermining the job market at home.

Managing this diversity is global concern. Most European countries have experienced dramatic significant number of immigration from the Middle East; Argentina and Venezuela host a significant number of migrants from South American countries; and nations from India to Iraq find great cultural diversity within their borders.

Victory will go to the organization that maintain their flexibility, continually improve their quality, and beat their competition to the marketplace with a constant stream of innovative products and services. The field of OB provides a wealth of ideas and techniques to aid in realizing these goals.

Independent contractors can telecommute via computers and workplaces around the globe and change employers as the demand for their services changes. Software programmers, graphic designers, system analysts, technical writers, photo researcher, book and media editors, and medical transcribers are just a few examples of people who can work from home of other non-office locations.

As more employees do their jobs by linking to others through network, manager must develop new skills. First, the creation of global organization means the world never sleeps. At any time on any day, thousands of General electric employees are working somewhere. Second communication technology allows many technical and professional employees to their work at home, in their cars, or on the beach but it also means many feel like they never really get away from the office.

Third, organizations are asking employees to put in longer hours. Recent studies suggest employees want jobs that give them flexibility in their work schedules so they can better manage work-life conflicts. In fact, balancing work and life demands now surpasses job security as an employee priority.

Some key independent variables in positive OB research are engagement, hope, optimism, and resilience in the face of strain. Organization 3. It was 'to make cleanliness commonplace; to lessen work for women; to foster health and contribute to personal attractiveness, that life may be more enjoyable and rewarding for the people who use our products'.

In a history that now crosses three centuries, Unilever's success has been influenced by the major events of the day — economic boom, depression, world wars, changing consumer lifestyles and advances in technology. And throughout we've created products that help people get more out of life — cutting the time spent on household chores, improving nutrition, enabling people to enjoy food and take care of their homes, their clothes and themselves.

Balancing profit with responsible corporate behavior In the late 19th century the businesses that would later become Unilever were among the most philanthropic of their time. Today, Unilever still believes that success means acting with 'the highest standards of corporate behavior towards our employees, consumers and the societies and world in which we live'. Over the years we've launched or participated in an ever-growing range of initiatives to source sustainable supplies of raw materials, protect environments, support local communities and much more.

Through this timeline you'll see how our brand portfolio has evolved. At the beginning of the 21st century, our Path to Growth strategy focused us on global high-potential brands and our Vitality mission is taking us into a new phase of development.

More than ever, our brands are helping people 'feel good, look good and get more out of life' — a sentiment close to Lord Leverhulme's heart over a hundred years ago.

Timeline 19th century Although Unilever wasn't formed until , the companies that joined forces to create the business we know today were already well established before the start of the 20th century. At the beginning of the 20th century their expansion nearly outstrips the supply of raw materials. But instead they agree to merge - and so Unilever is created.

But while the business rationalizes operations, it also continues to diversify. The 21st century The decade starts with the launch of Path to Growth, a five-year strategic plan, and in further sharpens its focus on the needs of 21st century-consumers with its Vitality mission. In fact, million times a day, someone somewhere chooses a Unilever product.

Look in your fridge, or on the bathroom shelf, and you're bound to see one of our well-known brands. We create, market and distribute the products that people choose to feed their families and keep themselves and their homes clean and fresh.

Focusing on performance and productivity, we encourage our people to develop new ideas and put fresh approaches into practice. Hand in hand with this is a strong sense of responsibility to the communities we serve. We don't only measure success in financial terms; how we achieve results is important too.

We work hard to conduct our business with integrity - respecting our employees, our consumers and the environment around us. Unilever is one of the world's leading suppliers of fast-moving consumer goods. Here are some recent highlights from our three global divisions - Foods, home care and personal care.

Their leading brands have international appeal because they meet a need or fulfill a desire that people share, no matter where they live. It is indicator of political, economic, social and technological influences on organization. In case of legal factors, any trade policy or import duties are not affecting particularly Unilever Pakistan.

In Pakistan right now following liberalization policy under SAP by IMF made which they have to waive off all restrictions and moreover due to huge investment by Unilever Pakistan no government can afford to create hurdles in the way of an organization like Unilever Pakistan.

So one way or other they find way to cover it up. In case of change in lifestyle, the world has converted into global town now and people have readily access to every sort of information and they are becoming more quality conscious. Now more concerned towards environmental issues now and demand more social responsibility on the part of organizations now. Yet they keep on finding new ways of doing things and new things as well they continuously launched variants in brands etc.

This issue would be discussed more in detail in the problem statement. Unilever Problem Statement Our problem statement is regarding the shampoo segment of Unilever Pakistan. They have managed such a deep and broad product category and manage to do so well that some of their brand name has become the generic names for that particular product but this is not the story with Sunsilk and recently launched Lifebuoy Shampoo. Our problem statement is that what are the causes, which kept Unilever Pakistan away from market leader position in shampoo market.

External problems 4. And hence a strategy or a policy approval, formulated and implemented 50 years back becomes obsolete and discard in prevailing scenario and changing environment e. Here in this field they lag behind due to their long term strategy even in field of advertising given by their parent head office. Hence being an influence able organization they exhibit bureaucratic management style they want to maintain their status quo before these environmental changes like advertising trend.

Offices and branches of Unilever Pakistan are normally placed in domestic setup especially Multan branch, since it is a marketing organization, its office outlook and location must be in professional and well to do area which will contribute in proper functionality of branch and its employees as well.

This severe problem is being faced by Multan branch of Unilever Pakistan as well. Management team of Unilever Pakistan normally arrange excessive operational meeting, they have less emphasis on the strategy implementation part as compared to strategy formulation and planning.

All the decisions regarding product planning, development, distribution and even targets of the branches are centralized and are in hands of central sales office of Unilever Pakistan. Branches are given inflexible targets of sales — though data on these branch managers negotiate this figure but it takes too long.

Due to heavy capital investment in their brands Unilever Pakistan is unable to observe their slow moving brands which create a cost burden. As to launch a new brand complete research and development setup is required which is inflexible and cannot be re-utilized for another brand along with its consumer market is heavily flooded with products, there is very low probability that market will absorb new brands. Unilever Pakistan has very poor relationships with their dealers and retailers.

Their brand manager makes very rare visits to the retailers to know their problems, very little discounts are offered by Unilever Pakistan to their retailers. No prize scheme and incentive is given to dealers, retailers, wholesalers of Unilever Pakistan. Even Unilever Pakistan brand manager never bargain on the proper and prominent shelf space of their shampoos Sunsilk and Lifebuoy.

Unilever Pakistan has not been able to place any check on its smuggling shampoos into Pakistan e. Indonesian Sunsilk is made according to the demographic of Indonesia, when it will be used in Pakistan it will damage the hair of people, which deteriorate the brand image. Which create problem on local sales of Pakistan?

Employment insecurities in Unilever Pakistan also contribute negatively towards the performance of branch operations. All branch managers, brand managers and operation are transferred within branches of Unilever Pakistan allover Pakistan. This create an uncertainty among management team, new managers takes much time to settle in new branch and to understand new setup of branch and new dealers network.

This affects the branch operations and performance. Introduction of Sunsilk and Lifebuoy Sunsilk Shampoo Unilever Pakistan stepped into shampoo business in with Sunsilk initially with only two variants: 1. Sunsilk egg shampoo 2. Due to their poor marketing in 90s Clinic Plus faced big failure. The sales of Clinic Plus were not up to the expectations of the company and they abandoned the production of Clinic Plus. Unilever Pakistan again re-launched the Sunsilk at the end of with 12 different variants with new name of fruitamines.

Now the focus was on different kind of hair i. Then they reduced their frutamines Sunsilk to six variants. Now with launch of White Sunsilk they have seven variants of Sunsilk.

They launched Lifebuoy shampoo using this brand name in Initially it was successful according to the retailers everyone was asking about it and asked for retailers opinion as well. But it flopped badly because it was mainly targeted towards lower and middle income segment and Unilever Pakistan wanted this segment to switch from bath soap to shampoo and wanted to develop shampoo market in this segment as well.

But this class did not switched to Lifebuoy shampoo because they were in habit of using soap for washing their hair, more over they did not find anything unique and new about the shampoo. Other than being liquid. So, they again returned to Lifebuoy soap.

Unilever should focus on all the problems involved in the area of interest such power issue, water issue etc. Political instability affects the performance of company. Financial management find difficulties in investing their reserves. The other point after hiring them to train them and when they get experience they are leaving. In addition to this, the sale of tea which is a major volume driver for the company has been hampered by rampant smuggling of tea into the country via Afghanistan.

The dismal law-and-order situation and economic slowdown have also restrained disposable incomes for the public at large. This has in turn suppressed the potential growth in consumer sales in the country. Still the company has managed to register stellar growth in its sales and profits and appears well placed to continue riding this wave of success in coming years.

Data collection method Data Collection is an important aspect of any type of research study. Inaccurate data collection can impact the results of a study and ultimately lead to invalid results. Data collection methods for impact evaluation vary along a continuum. At the one end of this continuum are quantitative methods and at the other end of the continuum are Qualitative methods for data collection. Data collection is the important tool for any research work and completes the research report.