BPM Business Rules and Alerts – Helping Avoid Process Stalls and Other Issues

Most of us like things to run smoothly and predictably – no surprises. When something happens to cause a process to stall, result in an unexpected result, or have other issues, we get very frustrated, especially if it could have been easily avoided.  It seems like nearly every time I hit the drive through at a local franchise to pick up dinner for the family on my way home after a late day at the office, I run into one of these issues in what should be a smooth process.  The thing that always strikes me is that this franchise is so worried about how quickly they perform the process, they have complete forgotten about the importance of doing it right.  Apparently, there are no checks to make sure that they human element in the process produced the product ordered.  The business suffers from having to remake orders along with all the issues that come from having bad customer service.  I’m not sure if it’s that the person responsible for pressing the “Served” button is able to do so before the order is even sacked or if no one is responsible for making sure what is sacked up is what’s on the order.  The result tends to be:

1. If I simply drive away, I get home missing some of my order or some of the items have been prepared incorrectly. Now I either have to drive back to get the items or go without.  Either way, I’m not happy.
2. If I refuse to move from the drive through window to take time to review my order myself, other customers are held up causing the franchise to fail to meet their required serve times. No one is happy.
3. If I leave the drive through window and stop in the parking lot to review my order myself, chances are good I have to park and go in the store to get my items while the rest of my order gets cold or go through the drive through again causing other customers order to be out of synch since I am not paying.  No one is happy.

As I sit here with no sandwich again since I opted to simply drive away today without checking my order myself, I couldn’t help but think about how situations like this could be avoided in the business world by implementing the Agility BPM Business Process Management (BPM) Solution.  Business processes are created and automated for several reasons:

• Reduce process costs
• Increase quality/reduce number of errors
• Reduce process throughput times
• Reduce training time and expenses
• Reduce number of internal support requests
• Increase forecast accuracy
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Improve decision -making

Where Agility BPM? provides true value is in its ability to attach business rules and alerts to key steps of the process. In my example above, had there been something to require order checking by the franchise staff, the frustration and cost to deal with it could be avoided.  In the larger business world, a process issue could be something as simple a forgetting to attach a document before sending the task to the next process participant, not completing a form in its entirety, or scheduling two meetings to occur in the same space or involving the same people at the same time. BPM business rules and alerts can be put in place as check offs and take effect when something more is required before moving on to the next step.

Take the time to set up your business rules and alerts when you first design your process and whenever making process improvements and test them to make sure they work as expected. Being prepared for these issues will help your business prevent more serious issues from occurring and allow you eliminate the costs associated with dealing with them. Remember, every process is subject to human error in some way, shape or form – so plan for it!

Agility BPM, Business Process Management

Written by: Karie Barrett |