In the pursuit of productivity and competitiveness, more and more companies use BPM (Business Process Management) to organize and manage their supply chain and to deliver the highest possible value to customers with the lowest cost and highest quality.
In this context, there are different approaches for the use of BPM software to support your company regarding the processes it uses, they are:
Human Centric, Integration Centric, Customer Centric and Document-Centric, each used for different organizational profiles.
In this post, we present the main features of each with the focus on the Document-Centric approach, so you can know which factors to take into account when choosing BPM software and check whether it is the most suitable for the management model of your organization’s business processes.
Business process management approaches: Human Centric, Integration Centric, and Document Centric
Human Centric
In this type of process Human Centric judgment and decision-making are key, so in addition to the focus on the human being, the use of collaborative tools can be of great help.
It is divided into 2 types:
- People Intensive: includes a high level of relations between people with decision-making and exception handling.
- Decision intensive: in this case, the human role also includes proper and thorough information gathering and decision making critical for business.
Integration Centric
There is tiny and sometimes no human interference in Integration Centric processes, which usually contain a high amount of repetitive transitions (practically without exception) in a long chain of sequentially integrated processes.
Document Centric
As is evident by the name, Document-Centric processes are those in which documents have a crucial role in creating value for the organization.
Companies involved in contract management, procurement processes, law and even engineering, as well as health institutions relying on clinical tests and medical reports, are good examples of Document-Centric Processes.
When you use Document Centric Process Management, it optimizes and can improve work processes by understanding the document flow that people use in their tasks.
The goal is to enable the visualization of the process as a whole and thus address any obstacles that occur during the activity flow.
In this approach, the documents are considered a key element of any process of the production chain; it is necessary that virtually all outputs or activities are formalized in some kind of their standardized document, without which the next step can not advance depending on what was determined as the correct procedure.
Some of the most common activities in a Document Centric process are as follows:
- Transcription information documents for systems
- Scanning Images
- Electronic Form filling (or paper transcription forms for the system)
- Document Review
- Document Approval
- Image collection through specialized capture devices
- Signature Gathering (physical and / or digital) and discussion
- Overview and reports
- Decision-making on the basis of all these documents
As it turns out, some differences are part of this type of process, like taking necessary special care when designing and modeling.
It is important to bear in mind that despite this BPM approach focusing more on document management than people or the course of processes, BPM Document Centric technologies and methods should not be used solely for routing “paper”.
On the contrary, it is very necessary for collaboration between individuals and work groups so that documents flow with agility, to be shared and decisions made from them are the most correct and assertive possible.
When choosing Document Centric BPM:
As reflected in the above, every organization where documents have a key role and that the decision-making depends on these documents (of their reliability and integrity) should demand the Document-Centric approach of business process management.
To achieve this, a BPM tool, that in addition to being able to design and model processes efficiently and intuitively, also allows the creation of automatic alerts and the sending of scheduled messages, and also monitors in real-time through easy to interpret dashboards, can be a big help.
After all, transparency, traceability, and agility in the flow of information are essential for this type of process.
See more about business process management and documentation.