Three Aspects for the Visualization of Business

It has been six years and a few months since Questetra’s establishment.

During those six years, we have helped many enterprises with their BPM (Business Process Management) activities. And we have used the terms ‘Visualization of Business’ in many occasions.

• We want to visualize our Business Processes so that it will be done in the a single procedure in order to improve the business efficiency!
• We have to visualize Business Process so that we can detect a problem immediately when it occurs!
• We want to improve the business, but we won’t know where the problem lies unless we visualize our Business Processes!

These are some of the comments from people working on Business Improvement and the importance of “Visualization of business”. But what exactly is ‘Visualization of Business’?

‘Visualization of Business’ is very important. Everybody is aware of this.

However, it is difficult to understand what “Visualization of business” really means. People might feel that obtaining the ‘Visualization of business’ seems like a very difficult task.

I think it often happens that even if the leader of the business improvement project yelled: ‘We are going to Visualize our business!’, the team members who heard the words would not understand correctly what he or she meant.

Although the words of ‘Visualization of business’ sound like something good, but many people probably don’t understand the specific meaning. Also, the meaning might be different for each person. Therefore, I think these are risky words.

In this article, I would like to eliminate the ambiguity of the term “Visualization of Business”, in order to show you how to understand it easily.

The term “Visualization of Business” is ambiguous, because often people don’t understand what the word ‘Business’ refers to.

What will be Visualized will be clarified, once we dig down into the meaning of the word ‘Business’, from three aspects. The three aspects of “Business” we will discuss are “RPR”

1. Rules
2. Progress
3. Results

When you visualize your business from these three aspects, the ultimate purpose of Business Improvement, which is increasing sales, could double! a 50% cost reduction could be achieved! and a 120% quality improvement could be finally obtained! (Who knows?!)

The aim is to clarify the Business Rules (we can say Procedure, instead), and to share the Rules (procedures) with all the people who are involved in it. This is also called Standardization of Business.

Don’t you think we can get something good out of it? When we clarify the business deliverables, what triggers the operation, who handles what in which order and how. And finally share this knowledge with everyone?

By defining the Business Rules into a visual form, such as Business manuals or a Business Process diagram (Workflow Chart), and make them referable by hanging on the wall, we will enable everybody to share ‘how to proceed correctly”, “how to proceed with high efficiency”, and “how to proceed without making any mistakes”.

If you don’t have a Business manual or a Business Process diagram (Workflow Chart), hurry up and create one!

Visualization of Progress exists to make it possible to grasp the current situation of the operations which are being processed based on the Business process diagram or Business manuals.

Specifically, it is to be able to detect ‘delays’, ‘mistakes’ and ‘workload of staff’ on each and every operation in real time.

To acquire ‘Visualization of Progress’, ‘Visualization of Rules’ must be obtained first. In addition, you need to prepare a management mechanism to understand the Progress.

You might be able to manage the Progress in a Classical way using emails and Spreadsheets (Excel, etc.), as long as there are a small number of operations. But when the number of occurrences of operations becomes larger, such a classical method will break down soon. So I recommend you to utilize a BPM system that provides good control of Progress management.

You can improve the quality and efficiency of operations, by visualizing the Progress to achieve the detection of delay and the prevention of mistakes. As a result, you will get more chances of achieving customer satisfaction improvement, or cutting cost.

This is to understand the Result of completed operations. Being able to review the way past operations were processed.

For example, to be able to check the number of processes completed during a certain period, or the average time to carry out the process.

For ‘Visualization of Results’, I also recommend you to use a system of some sort. It’s OK to utilize classical spreadsheets (Excel, etc.), but you can visualize it more easily and more accurately by using a BPM system equipped with features such as recording the number of operations and its processing time, etc. And even display these indicators on a graph.

You will be able to measure the KPI (Key Performance Indicator) of the operation, and to discover bottlenecks through “Visualization of Result”. As a result, you can come up with a better way to process the operations, and hence achieve business improvement.

So far, I have been telling you about the three aspects of ‘Visualization of Business’, and the efforts on “Visualization of business” lead to the BPM activities, which I will discuss next.

BPM Activity is a Business Improvement activity that consists of iterating the following three activities:

• Defining the Business Process
• Executing the Tasks exactly along the business processes that you have defined
• Analyzing the results of performance

For the ‘Visualization of Business’, the following must be provided in order: Visualization of Rule, Visualization of Progress and Visualization of Result. And based on the findings of these three views, each visualization will be repeated again and again.
The cycle of the visualization of the three aspects of business, and the cycle of the three steps of BPM activity do not necessarily have a one-to-one correspondence. The following figure shows the similarities among them.

The result of sequentially processing the ‘Visualization of business’ activities from the point of view of the three aspects is to do BPM activity.

Unfortunately, the words of BPM (Business Process Management) are not known widely, in the actual field of business. I hope everybody could understand BPM as the organized ‘Visualization of business’.

If you think you want to start ‘Visualization of business’, do it now using the BPM System Questetra BPM Suite. Questetra BPM Suite is Free for trial.

To start getting the visualization of your business for Free, click on the link below to register.

That’s it for today!