This chapter describes the overviews of Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Intelligence (BI); the importance of BPM in global business; and the importance of BI in global business. BPM enables organizations to align business functions with customer needs and helps executives determine how to deploy, monitor, and measure the organizational resources. When properly executed, BPM has the ability to enhance productivity, reduce costs, and minimize risk in global business. BI includes the applications, tools, and best practices that enable the analysis of information to improve organizational performance. Companies use BI to detect the significant events and identify the business trends in order to quickly adapt to their changing business environment. The chapter argues that applying BPM and BI has the potential to enhance organizational performance and reach strategic goals in global business.
TopBackground
Business process is defined as the specific ordering of work activities across time and place, with a beginning, an end, and identified input and output (Davenport, 1993). Business process is a sequence of executions in a business context based on the purpose of creating products and services (Scheer, 1999). Business process involves people from the different functional units in the same organization and go across organizational boundaries for the reasons of business partnership, thus increasing the complexity of managing the process (Stohr & Zhao, 2001). Shaw et al. (2007) stated that an organization’s current performance depends upon its business processes’ collective ability to achieve its fundamental objectives. Organizations implement business processes in order to produce the value for customers (Earl, Sampler, & Short, 1995).
BPM has been an intensely discussed topic in the information system (IS) research field as well as in practice since the late 1980s (Houy, Fettke, & Loos, 2010). BPM is a methodology that allows companies a faster organizational adaptation to the continuously changing requirements of customers (Neubauer, 2009). The operations of BPM practices have evolved from the functional division of work (Taylor, 1911) and business process reengineering (BPR) (Davenport & Short, 1990) to the complex practices of the holistic end-to-end business processes involving the integration of business and IT (Smith & Fingar, 2007). BPM includes the components of total quality management (TQM), the value chain, Six Sigma, Lean, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) (Paim, Caulliraux, & Cardoso, 2008). By integrating IT and business practices, BPM broadens the scope of BPR, focusing on achieving performance improvement by eliminating the non-value added process steps (Khalil, 1997).