Business Process Improvment

BPI focuses on changing business processes to improve their effectiveness.

Business process improvement (BPI) is a set of disciplined approaches and tools that managers use to enhance their company's performance.  As the name suggests, BPI (also called business process management, or BPM) focuses on changing business processes to improve their effectiveness.  In organizations that use BPI:

• Managers and employees know their business processes and capture them in process maps, procedure manuals, or agreed-upon "ways of doing things."
• Managers track the performance of processes in the form of metrics that can assess the quality of inputs and outputs or gauge the effectiveness of activities.
• Top management systematically invests in its processes.  In some cases, these investments are intended to improve current operations--for example, enhancing the efficiency or order processing.  In other cases, these investments are meant to improve the company's competitive position--for instance, strengthening the product-development or strategy-formulation process.
• Organizations that do not use BPI may do these same things  However, their use of BPI is usually sporadic, rather than a regular way of doing business.

ACTION POINT: BPI is a tool that can be used at every level of an organization--by a manager who sets out to change a relatively simple process within her department or by top executives who introduce a company wide initiative designed to improve performance throughout the organization.