To thrive in today's competitive market midsize organizations need to be agile, responding quickly to changing market conditions and exceeding customers' demands.
Unlike larger companies, midsize organizations can't lean on globally recognized brands: a lost customer, or a missed opportunity to recruit a new customer, may never be recouped. So they need to find unique ways of differentiating their offerings. With limited resources, midsize organizations must struggle to adapt to changing market conditions, whether these are reduced time to market, increased expected service levels, or price-cutting.
By remaining flexible midsize organizations can react faster to changing customer requirements than their larger, less agile competitors. In fact, by being smaller (i.e. easier manageable), they could afford themselves more dynamics in executing the business, which enhances their responsiveness on the highly-changing business environment.
Therefore, achieving business flexibility is a necessary condition for the business development of SMEs.
Business process management (BPM) is a class of software that treats processes as assets that directly contribute to enterprise performance by driving operational excellence and business agility. The goal of BPM is to drive consistency and efficiency of operations by modelling and automating an organization's core business processes - expense reporting, employee on-boarding, benefit claims processing and more. These processes are static and structured, making them easy to document, model and automate. In that context, BPM excellences on modelling “best work practices” in companies that helps them preserve capital, identify threats and minimize risks.
The technology development in last years is creating new opportunities for realizing the SME’s flexibility. Especially important is enabling gathering much more information from a running business process or information relevant for its execution that can support their ability to be responsive.
There are two main trends:
- expansion of the application of GPS signals and RFID sensors and
- increased usage of the public information streams on the web, like discussion forums.
In a way this information enables the reaction on undefined changes in the right way and in the right (real) time. Indeed, the response time on changes is decreasing dramatically, what has created an enabling environment for the dynamic business process management.
The dynamic BPM in this context means that the business processes will be aware of the changes in the (external/internal) environment and will be able to change/adapt themselves accordingly (but in an not-previously-planned, i.e. ad-hoc way) in order to keep the business process running well.
For more information, please visit http://www.reflexforsmes.eu.
