“How can I structure my Business Process Management (BPM) system to share core processes with the entire organisation but also give each business unit access to their own specific process information?”
This is a common question asked by Quality and Improvement managers from organisations where each business unit or business area is quite independent, but core functions such as HR and Finance, support the whole business. In this article I explore how best to do this.
It makes a great deal of sense to structure your BPM system so that core functions delivered according to a standardised process, are accessible and accessed by the whole organisation whilst business units which have individual ways of working, are kept separate.
In fact if this isn’t done, the end-to end core functions, such as HR, have to be repeated for each business unit. This is obviously inefficient (repetition of the same information several times) and also easily leads to inconsistencies between the business areas - even for core functions, which should be standardised to best practice.
In addition, your BPM system will be of most benefit if it is structured so that the cross functional relationship between business units is represented, thereby modelling the end-to-end process across the organisation. This is because customers and suppliers generally don’t have a relationship with just one business unit. They have a relationship with the whole organisation and the better the end-to end process is understood, the more easily it can be improved.
So if you are an organisation where:
It is important to structure your BPM system to share core processes with the entire organisation, but give each business unit access to their own specific process information – whilst at the same time clearly showing the links between them.
The Triaster platform, allows each business unit to set up a Process Library (secure website) containing that business units own processes, which they (and only they) are able to capture and update.
Maps within each library are able to link, both within the Business Unit library and across other Business Unit libraries, where they form part of a cross-functional process.
Core functions such as HR and Finance have their own libraries, containing their own internal processes. These usually need to be confidential. However, the standardised core processes which support all the Business Units (e.g. the expenses claim process) are accessible from each of the Business Unit specific libraries, so that users of each Business Unit specific library can access all the processes that they might need (both Business Unit specific and core) from just one place.
Business Units are not able to alter core processes that they don't own. So for example, only Finance can alter the expenses claim process and not Marketing and Communications, even though Marketing and Communications will be able to access the expenses claim process from their own library.
Search only returns results for the library searched. So for example, anyone searching for 'working at height' in the Civil Engineering Library (for example) only has results returned from that library and not from the Utilities 'working at height' process from the Utilities' Library. There is however, the option to search across all libraries - a global search - should the end user want to view all available business processes.
At Triaster we call this Multiple Library Architecture.
Multiple Library Architectures ensure that:
Triaster recommends setting up a Multi Library Architecture as follows:
Whilst Multiple Library Architecture gives optimal benefits, if you are getting started with implementing a BPM system this can seem just a bit too much to think about.
Many Triaster customers therefore start with just one Process Library, but structure its design to separate out their core processes.
National Oilwell Varco have designed their system to show each of their Business Units at the top level - please see image below:
Within each business unit processes are grouped either along product lines, or as core or common processes - which are not specific to any product family, but are required for all work across the division. Please see image below.
We hope that you have found this article helpful. If you would like to discuss how best to structure your BPM system, we would love to hear from you.
You may also find it helpful to look at other Triaster customer homepage designs.
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