By Invitation: Caspar Jans - Senior Director Business Transformation, Software AG
Caspar Jans will be a keynote speaker on our Business Transformation Day on the 10th of November. In this contribution, he shares his views on the - more than ever - relevance of BPM (and BPM tools such as ARIS) in the context of current management challenges. For more information on the agenda, speakers, and experts of the round table session follow this link.
The concept of the “License to Operate” is all too familiar for the manufacturing industry. This means that companies very often need to prove that they are in control of the processes that they are executing. Just take the example of a chemical plant (I’ve worked in this industry for 15+ years): it is crucial that the plant operations department has a very tight grip on all the things that go on in and around a plant. One runaway process can cause severe damage, not only to the plant itself, but also to the surroundings and if such a plant is located close to urban communities it is not too complicated to imagine the enormous potential damages.
Governments and external authorities have established guidelines and requirements for certain industries to make sure that there is a certain amount of predictable reliability of running such a plant without problems. This concept is called the license to operate and nowadays, this concept is no longer only applicable to the manufacturing industries, but also to others.
One major part of the LTO (License-to-Operate) is the Management System, a central place where all relevant process descriptions, procedural instructions and pre-requisites are stored and managed. Very often this repository of knowledge is owned by the Quality Management department and was, and often still is, limited to the production facilities of an organization. The Management System was the vault in which all reviewed, approved, and valid documents were stored, and it acts as the basis for external audits.
On the other hand, over the course of the last 30 years we have seen the development, rise (and fall) and resurgence of Business Process Management, which is a management philosophy based on the construct of a business process that unites and unifies all relevant organization entities (think about people, activities, inputs, systems, risks and controls and much more) into one comprehensive, connected, and aligned view.
Where, back in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, the focus of BPM was quite heavy on the process modeling (or process documentation), we are now witnessing a shift in focus to the facilitation of transformation, optimization, and control of the organization’s execution of work. It is about making sure that the strategic targets are translated into an operating model and detailed out into value chains (end to end preferably) and single business processes, rather than making sure every process is documented to the nth degree of granularity.
The capabilities a decent BPM platform (like ARIS) has, turns out to be a near perfect match for the requirements companies have for their Management System. Focusing both on recording what needs to be done, making sure every relevant employee can consume it and preferably provide insight in the compliance employees show regarding the standards (think about process mining and integrated dashboarding).
Join us as Caspar Jans shares his visionary view of the evolution of the process world in terms of the relevance of BPM as well as insight into “how an Enterprise Management System can help you steer through these challenging times!”.
Register today!
Visit our Business Transformation Day and meet Caspar Jans in person at Schloss Krickenbeck.
