BPM Blog

Can processes live in a bubble? Can they function well without information from the outside world? The answer in most cases is no. In order to build a solution which improves your business, provides better service and speeds up problem solving, processes must be in tune with the environment in which they live. You can achieve this in several ways:

• Provide processes with information from external systems.
• Ensure that processes listen for and react to external events such as request overflow, passed deadlines, or out-of-bound statistics.
• Define decision points with business rules, where processes evaluate external data before selecting the next step.
• Enable increased human interaction with processes, and joint human/process decision making.
• Give end-users and developers the opportunity to provide feedback and suggest process improvements.

To sum up: a process that lives in a bubble will stay in the bubble. Burst that bubble and a whole new world awaits.

Are you able mitigate the risk to which your staff may be subjecting your organisation in relation to corporate hospitality and Bribery Act 2010?

There is definite confusion on how to manage a “gifts and hospitality” business culture when supplying goods and services to much of UK PLC. Much of our business relationships involve elements of human interaction, which if not handled professionally and correctly as outlined in the Company HR manual, or in compliance with the Bribery Act 2010 could end with both the Company and the employee in trouble with the Law. So how do we conduct business and stay within the law?

When is accepting a cup of frothy coffee from a prospective supplier considered a “gift” and hence needs recording, as opposed to polite hospitality that needs no sense of regulation and compliance? The cost of the administrative overhead can often lead to managers ignoring responsibility and turning a blind eye, until it’s too late and the employee is caught out with their photograph on a social site such as Facebook with a large cocktail in their hand, worse still if it is a supplier’s site!

A great deal of business relationships begin to be forged at events that involve a relaxed environment, such as trade shows or exhibitions. Whether a defence contractor at an airshow, or a civil servant at a “best practice” suppliers event, care needs to be taken in how the relationship is managed, and that any outside influence has not had a negative impact on corporate decision making.

The logic and rules that make up the content of the Bribery Act 2010 can actually be modelled and executed in intelligent software and then released as an application to all employees’ of an organisation. E-forms on the desktop or on mobile devices that allow employees instant access in real time to the Company’s Gifts and Hospitality register; allowing managers to authorise or decline requests, are now readily available. Managers can also see values using management dashboards to track trends or spot potential wrong doing before the issue gets out of hand, protecting the Company’s image and reputation to say nothing of the employee.

Training employees on the potential dangers of mismanaging the “Gifts and Hospitality” maze is not enough in today’s hectic business life. Supporting the process with Human Centric tools and process management helps the employee help not just themselves but also their employer stay out of the courts.

At PNMsoft, we specialise at automating Gift and Hospitality business processes; so regulation and requirements accompanied by good compliance is what we do. Our latest offering, called SEQUENCE Corporate Compliance, provides a very simple web based process for recording gifts and hospitality that gets signed off at different stages depending upon the business rules, the value and timescale. With full reporting and real-time dashboards, managers can view and keep detailed audits of all transaction across all business units and subsidiaries.

One of the keys to understanding the Act is to realise that it’s not intended to stop organisations from changing how they do business, but it does mean that keeping gifts and hospitality ‘reasonable’ within the spirit of the business being influenced; making sure everything is audited and documented by carefully maintaining objectivity between the decision maker (manager) and the person who gets the hospitality invite.

PNMsoft’s Corporate Processes are available to be integrated with existing procurement and HR systems to provide cost effective corporate compliance.

The Pareto principle (known as the 80-20 rule) states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Pareto often gets quoted as a guiding principle when automating workflow tasks. You hear statements like, “Let’s design a workflow which covers 80% of the process instances, otherwise we’ll spend 80% of our development effort catering for the 20% of process instances which don’t fit the standard.”

However, by designing a workflow which only caters for 80% of the scenarios it could well be the case that the other 20% of the scenarios still account for 80% of the human effort, say in a call centre environment.

Providing a rigid workflow which doesn’t allow knowledge workers to flex the process will lead to low adoption of the toolset, reduced morale and poor customer service through disparate working practices.

Much better then, would be to allow users of BPMS to perform ad hoc tasks and to break out of the constraints of the standard workflow when required to. If this isn’t catered for in the design of the workflow, you will quickly see people reverting back to emails, instant messaging and so on, reducing the ROI on BPMS, invalidating the governance, control and standardisation aspects referenced in the original business case and resulting in a hard-to- maintain hybrid environment.

By using ad hoc tasks, such as the SEQUENCE toolbar, you can give the users the option to create ad hoc tasks within a structured workflow. For example, they may be uncertain about the required actions for a sensitive health claim, so could ask a colleague or subject matter expert for their opinion without relinquishing control of the task. Alternatively, they could request that the process instance goes through an additional level of approval or posts case notes to a case management view ahead of finalising the claim.

This can all be handled within the SEQUENCE environment, so while the users are not necessarily following the standard one-size-fits-all workflow, they are still within a controlled environment and all information exchanges and events are being recorded and are therefore auditable in the structured BPMS environment.

The SEQUENCE toolbar buttons can be used to populate variables which allow the user to steer the process instance along a particular route within the workflow (for example, an additional level of approval could be based on the request exceeding a monetary threshold).

Alternatively, the SEQUENCE toolbar buttons can be tied to SEQUENCE API functions, for example, to create a new message, or as hyperlinks to additional pages such as additional workflows, SEQUENCE MI views or case management notes.

My favourite of all of these features is the ‘Suggest an improvement’ button. This is used to start a simple form-based workflow which allows end users to suggest an improvement to the workflow configuration. This then gets fed through to a product manager who collates the information and subsequently starts off a change management process if the suggestion is accepted. This not only helps with requirements gathering in the iterative development cycle, it also positively engages with the end users and makes them truly feel they can influence the solution strategy and help the company grow.