Business Process Management (Bilingual Teaching Series)

Author: En Niu Ping Di
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-11-01
Features: Managing Business Process Flows (MBPF) is an innovative approach to studying certain core concepts in operations, which, together with finance and marketing, constitutes the three main functional areas of business. MBPF views operations management as the design and management of business processes and adopts this perspective as a unified paradigm for studying operations. MBPF employs a persuasive methodology to discuss core concepts in three steps. First, it simulates and understands the processes and the various "flows" within them; then, it examines the causal relationships between process structure and performance metrics; finally, it implements management measures by filtering management methods ("process drivers") and assessing their impact on process performance. The purpose of this book (comprising four parts) is to demonstrate how managers can plan and control process structure and process drivers to achieve desired enterprise process performance.
Part 1: Process Management and Strategy
This part introduces the basic concepts of business processes and management strategy. A process is the core technology of all organizations that produce and transport products (including goods and services) to meet customer needs. A process is a process of converting inputs into outputs through a series of interconnected steps, utilizing capital and human resources. Process management strategy refers to establishing a competitive advantage in the characteristics of the products offered and aligning process capabilities with target product features.
Part 2: Process Evaluation
This part explores key process performance metrics, their relationships, and the management methods used to control them, particularly the three operational indicators that affect process performance: process time, flow rate, and inventory. Process time can be reduced by shortening the time of critical steps, flow rate can be increased by improving process capacity, and inventory can be reduced by decreasing batch sizes. In this part, we will focus on the average value while temporarily ignoring the impact of uncertainty on process performance. The average values of process time, flow rate, and inventory can be linked using Little's Law.
Part 3: Process Variation
This part examines the impact of uncertainty in processes on process performance and explores the management methods for planning and controlling it. In the presence of variability in inflows and outflows, safety inventory can be used to maintain the availability of materials and products. Due to variability in inflows and processing times, safety capacity can minimize process time. Safety time provides a reliable estimate for customer service time. Feedback control is used to dynamically monitor and adjust process performance in real time.
Part 4: Process Integration
This part introduces the synchronization principles of information flow and material flow through economical process networks. The ideal scenario is to eliminate waste caused by extra costs, defects, delays, and inventory. The long-term approach is to make processes more intensive, flexible, and predictable, reducing frequent fluctuations in forecasts due to economies of scale and process changes. This requires continuously identifying and eliminating the root causes of inefficiency, rigidity, and variability, integrating various branch processes using information technology, with the goal of designing and controlling processes to ensure continuous flow without waiting, inventory, or defects. Finally, we summarize different philosophical approaches to improving processes.
Appendix Includes:
● A summary of MBPF "Method." It is hoped that the MBPF checklist will be helpful to action-oriented readers.
● Background information on probability and statistics. It is assumed that the readers of this book have some familiarity with these concepts.