Business Process Management: Method, Lifecycle, and Maturity Model
Competitive companies keep their processes under control across departments, systems, and locations. What makes that possible is business process management (BPM), a process-oriented approach to managing a company that measures, controls, and continuously improves business processes.
The goal of BPM is to support your company’s strategy effectively through optimized processes. In manufacturing companies, business process management is also the foundation for successful digitalization and automation. After all, processes need to transparency before they can be digitalized.
What is Business Process Management?
Business process management (BPM) is a holistic approach to process-oriented company management. It captures, analyzes, and optimizes every business process within a company end to end, from the customer inquiry to delivery. Business process management defines which processes exist, who is responsible for them, how they are documented, and how they are measured. All the roles and IT systems involved are included in this approach.
Business Process Management in the Context of Process Management and Process Optimization
When discussing process management, several closely related terms often come up, each with a distinct meaning and purpose. Drawing a clear line between them helps clarify responsibilities and expectations across your company.
All three areas are interconnected, with business process management providing the framework that allows individual improvements to deliver lasting results. An improvement delivers its full value only when upstream and downstream processes, roles, and systems are considered as well. Governance, KPIs, and continuous monitoring help turn individual improvements into sustainable process excellence.
The BPM Lifecycle: The Five Phases of Business Process Management
We treat business process management as an ongoing management task, one that runs continuously through four to five phases of the BPM lifecycle.
For the BPM lifecycle to have a lasting effect, the changes in your organization need to be supported by change management. Optimized processes and IT systems only deliver their full value when your employees can use them effectively and independently.
1. BPM Analysis: Assessing Current Processes and Process Maturity
Existing processes are captured and assessed for process maturity and strategic fit, including the system landscape that supports them. This analysis concludes with clear potential and a first, prioritized set of action areas.
2. Design and Process Modeling: Defining KPIs and Process Reengineering
Following the in-depth review of your processes, modeling conventions, rules, and KPIs are defined. Process reengineering is then used to model the target processes, typically in BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation).
3. Execution and Process Implementation: Anchoring Workflows with Change Management
Your entire organization, including all systems and employees, is aligned with the new workflows. The requirements are turned into an actionable plan that guides the rollout of BPM and equips your employees, through change management, to implement it for the long term.
4. Optimization: Achieving Lasting Process Excellence with Lean Principles and CIP
Using continuous improvement (CIP), we permanently increase your company's process performance and keep your internal workflows stable and disruption-free.
5. Monitoring and Control: Making Deviations Visible with Process KPIs and Process Monitoring
We continue to apply the principle of continuous improvement even after optimization. Process performance is measured in real time and steered using KPIs. Deviations between target and actual states become visible and can be addressed in a targeted way.
Process Modeling with BPMN: From Target Process Design to a Foundation for Automation
In the second phase of the BPM lifecycle, design and modeling, target business processes are defined and documented in a consistent format. The international standard for this is BPMN.
What is BPMN?
BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) is used for the graphical modeling of business processes and is continuously developed further. The notation provides a consistent visual language, using standardized symbols for activities, events, decisions (gateways), and responsibilities (pools and lanes). Since every symbol has one meaning, business units, IT, and external partners can interpret any process model or BPMN diagram the same way. This avoids misunderstandings between process description and system implementation and turns a clean model into the foundation for control and automation.
The current version of this standard is BPMN 2.0. BPMN models created with it are machine-readable, meaning workflow and automation platforms can read and execute them. An executable workflow can therefore be derived directly from a process diagram. Process modeling thus becomes the groundwork for automation.
Effective BPMN models follow fixed modeling conventions, covering naming rules, level of detail, and symbol scope, so that the process landscape stays consistent. The right balance is essential, with enough detail to support control and implementation while remaining clear and easy to maintain.
Process Documentation as the Foundation
Before processes can be controlled or automated, they must be documented in a traceable way. Process documentation captures all the workflows, roles, interfaces, and systems involved in a consistent format and makes process knowledge accessible to everyone in your organization, independent of individual employees. Consistent modeling conventions make process documentation comparable across departments and locations. This creates a single source of truth, a shared and binding knowledge base that business units, IT, and management can all rely on equally.
BPM Tools and Software at a Glance
Available tools in business process management broadly fall into four categories. We base our selection on your company’s maturity level and target state, taking a vendor-neutral approach.
-
Modeling and Documentation
Tools for creating process landscapes and BPMN models provide a foundation for establishing standards and documenting processes consistently.
-
BPM Suites
Platforms that combine process modeling, execution, and monitoring, supporting the control loop end to end.
-
Process Mining Tools:
Reconstruct current processes from system data to provide transparency into how they operate.
-
Automation Platforms:
Execute stable, standardized processes automatically, from the workflow engine to robotic process automation (RPA).
Defining the right tool depends on your existing process architecture, system landscape, and the employees who work with it every day. We support tool selection and implementation as a project service within process and system harmonization as well as software selection and MVP development.
Digitalization in Business Process Management:
BPM 4.0
Business process management is moving beyond documentation toward forward-looking, near-real-time management of business processes end to end. Digitalization makes this possible through real-time data, process mining, and the process automation. A digitally driven business process management 4.0 makes process management even more effective.
- Increased Transparency
-
Processes can be visualized, monitored, and controlled end to end.
- Effective Decisions
-
Data-driven analyses and what-if scenarios provide a detailed basis for decisions.
- Greater Resilience
-
Near-real-time data capture and clear role allocation make processes adaptable and resilient.
- Reduced Manual Work
-
Automation takes over rule-based routine tasks and frees up resources.
The Ingenics Maturity Model for Business Process Management
Gaining full control over your processes is a step-by-step journey. The Ingenics maturity model for business process management provides guidance in four stages that build on one another and outline out your current position, target picture, and roadmap. Each stage delivers measurable value while building the foundation for the next.
-
Level 1 – Standard
Processes are defined, described, and made accessible to everyone, including the definition of interfaces and roles. A process map makes the workflows visible.
-
Level 2 – Transparency
Process performance becomes measurable. Target and actual states are compared using KPIs, often supported by process mining.
-
Level 3 – Automation
Building on this transparency, workflows are automated, from simple workflows and routines to robotic process automation (RPA).
-
Level 4 – Prediction
Processes are monitored in real time and proactively steered through predictive analytics variations and are detected before they have an impact.
Combined with lean principles, the model leads to the highest level of maturity in effective process management. Waste is consistently reduced, and workflows are continually refined. Progress from one stage to the next becomes part of a continuous improvement process that sustains what has been achieved while driving further development.
Our process and system harmonization service page outlines how your company's process maturity level can be determined in a concrete project and aligned across locations and systems.
FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions About Process and System Harmonization
Which phases does the bpm lifecycle include?
A common view is a four-phase model. Analysis (capturing and assessing as-is processes), design and modeling (defining standards, rules, and KPIs, and modeling target processes), execution planning and implementation (aligning organization, systems, and employees), and optimization (establishing continuous improvement) through monitoring and control (measuring and steering process performance in near real time). What matters most is that the BPM lifecycle runs continuously.
How do you model a business process?
It starts with defining the purpose and scope. Which question should the model answer, for whom, and at what level of detail? The process is then scoped (trigger, outcome, interfaces) and represented in a consistent notation such as BPMN. Fixed modeling conventions keep the process landscape consistent. The process model is then validated with the people involved and refined wherever control or automation requires it, as detailed as necessary and as clear as possible.
What is a maturity model in process Management?
A maturity model shows, in defined stages, how far a company has developed in process management, from documented standards to forward-looking control. This objective classification prevents misguided investments in the process environment. Because automation and prediction require standardized processes, new technology is introduced, based on the maturity model, only once the necessary process foundations are in place.
When does external support in business process management pay off?
External support is especially valuable when building a process landscape, when maturity level, target picture, and roadmap need to be developed, and standards and process governance need to be defined. BPM consulting also pays off for project-based initiatives such as a merger, a carve-out, an SAP transformation, or the cross-location harmonization of processes and systems.