The Importance of Life Cycle Management Business Process

Today’s business world requires every company to be more flexible, more innovative, and more professional. As we all know that every business must be “regulated” and “operated” by a set of business processes. This is what causes the level of success of a business will be heavily influenced by how well life cycle management (life cycle) of the processes in the company. Companies are able to create, control, modify, and improve every business process with ease and flexibility will have the ability to remain in the vanguard of the competition.

While this time is certainly quite a lot of companies in the operation of the process of daily business is still done manually without any automation at all. While others have been partially automated, where the IT still has full control over the processes that are automated. With these conditions must be very unfortunate for the existence of firms in the face of increasingly tight competition like this.

With Business Process Management (BPM) is expected to answer the issues above. With BPM systems, the automation of business processes will be done quickly. In addition, control of automated processes that had been still held by the IT, will be owned entirely by the management, the party is more appropriate for it.

A solution of complete BPM system will support all phases of the Life cycle Process Definition process starting from, Execution & Process Control, to Monitoring and Process Improvement. Life cycle Process is in the form of a closed loop in which the last phase, the process will always be able to repeat the first phase again. Support for the full life cycle process like this will certainly help the company in an effort to enhance the quality of ongoing business processes.

Business Process Life cyle consists of the steps as follows:
1. Process Definition
In this phase of the process owner will design, analyze and define business processes that will be automated beginning of the activity flow, information flow, business rules and policies, resources required, to calculate the performance (Key Performance Indicators / KPIs) such as the length of processing time, cost of all activities, etc. In some BPM software solution, this step can be done by way of modeling and graphically describe the visual process, such as Microsoft Visio.

Once modeled, we can even simulate the processes for identifying critical paths and bottlenecks that may occur. In this simulation, we can also define a kind of Service Level Agreements (SLA) to test the performance design of the process. Expected by the simulation software for process design, process owners can obtain feedback before the process actually implemented by making the process truly optimal and has a high enough performance.

2. Execution & Process Control
Results from modeling and design processes conducted by the manager process then passed to the IT to do automation. After implementation, the employees at this phase and the relevant parties will run the process in accordance with the rules that have been defined previously, and supervisors and managers in charge of the process control the process. Corrective action is required at this phase when things happen that are not in accordance with the conditions set, such as the processing time delay, the exception, not the resources available, and so on.

3. Monitoring & Improvement Process
Business processes that have been implemented are monitored the performance by closely calculating Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and other measures that had been predetermined. Monitoring is done by using the data in the form of real-time, so it will fit with the real situation on the ground. From the results of such monitoring is the management can view and analyze whether the necessary repairs to a business process or not.

Conclusion
Life cycle management (life cycle) of the business process is very influential on the level of flexibility of a company that would be needed in the business world today. With the support of the BPM System (Business Process Management) that support full of life cycle process and closed-loop is the development of a system of business processes effectively and efficiently, which has the power fast enough response against to the changing business conditions will be realized.