108700 Resource 102363 102466 102466 1133124292734 1133124417938 Controlled Business Process (Part 2)

The enterprise's management layers add layers of complexity to business processes

<p>In a recent post <a title="Part 1" href="public/item/108466">I threw my two cents</a> into an online debate about the usefulness and efficacy of business processes. My take was simply that businesses have many fewer business processes than they believe that they have. In practical terms, businesses are held together by people who go the extra step to make sure that discrete tasks are linked together and work flows along in a rational and useful direction. </p><p>The question that I left at the end of Part 1 was &quot;What happens to a business process in the departments, as it moves away from the actual booked transaction and into the realm of business analysis, data aggregation and low, medium and high level decision making?&quot;</p><p>I have been amazed at some of what I've seen. How many different ways can there be to pay an invoice? Apparently an infinite number of ways. Over time the AP process becomes the amalgamation of the individual projects of hundreds or even thousands of individual managers, each one striving in their own way to make an improvement. But the process itself buckles under the weight of all this 'improvement'. What you end up with is a broken process trying to serve an infinite number of exceptions. It stops working, and only people can hold it together.</p><p>Vinnie <a title="Several good posts on process" href="http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2005/11/process_angiopl.html">Mirchandani is right about the need for process angioplasty</a>. But I would take it a step further. The company itself needs some angioplasty. There are too many layers of management. Over time they will again make 'improvements' to every process and while each discrete process improvement&nbsp;may be useful, or even profitable in and of itself, taken together they will again burden the process until it is a set of more or less discrete tasks held together by people going the extra step.</p><p>This is really the great competitive angle of the medium size business over the larger, and largest, players in its market. The medium size company still has a flat pyramid and as a result there are no extra layers of management looking to make process improvements. The company remains streamlined and decisive. They keep the anomalies and exceptions to the rarest few and work flows pretty quickly and efficiently through the business, from product development to service delivery and all of the back office processes like finance and HR. </p><p>Nobody has time to worry about an AP exception, so they don't. They simply get it paid, and if they lose a few dollars in the process at least they didn't waste twice as much on a 'fix'. </p><p>Working with small and medium companies on NetSuite implementations I have been really amazed to see how streamlined these companies are. They just get it done. </p> 9 application/xml false business process business processes The rebate process is the ideal candidate for BP Angioplasty http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2005/11/process_angiopl.html Part 1, in case you missed it http://sightlog.sightlinesconsulting.com/public/item/108466 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; T312461; YPC 3.0.1; (R1 1.5); .NET CLR 1.1.4322) 69.218.156.212 69.218.156.212 tfoydel false true false false true 205861 false false true false false false true 102363 blog blogsite/SightLines/web