Business process management with software support

Abstract

When managing business processes, whether it involves production, the area of economics, trade or personnel, one must ask the basic question: "Who is doing it and in what order?" This should be immediately followed by: "Were our decisions correct?" More descriptions of business processes are not sufficient in order to be certain that the approaches and decisions serve to meet the goals of the company. The idea is to directly try out how the particular processes are connected and coordinated, or how the individual information streams are solved. A range of software tools serve these purposes enabling not only capturing of the processes along with consequent adaptations prior to actual implementation of the information system, hut also making possible simulation of its operations. Various variants of business models can be evaluated prior to implementation of the information system thanks to realistic simulations, thereby enabling one to choose the best solution as the basis for decisions regarding the process changes. This serves to distinctly improve the speed of realization of the particular processes. What are the additional advantages from modelling and use of more forms of solutions? On the one hand, it improves the quality of the processes, for example, shortening the delivery terms for orders, decreasing costs for personnel servicing, while on the other hand it decreases the costs for controlling activities while additionally improving the quality of system support. This paper will initially briefly characterise Business Process Management, followed by a discussion of process controlling, an important part of the life cycle of process management, and finally examine the role of SW support when implementing process management (SW support for BPM).