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252 Chapter 9 • Organizational Change and Business Process Reengineering

Best Practices of BPM
BPM systems help managers in understanding the working of the business processes better so as
to manage them more efficiently. The successful implementation of BPM requires separation of
the following two broad categories of processes from one another.

HUMAN-INTENSIVE PROCESSES These processes are also known as “knowledge work.” They
depend on people to do the work. The interaction of people with one another and with the busi-
ness applications and databases are important. Human intervention is required to make effective
decisions. Examples: loan approvals, customer service.

SYSTEM-INTENSIVE PROCESSES These processes involve a large number of automated trans-
actions each day that do not require human judgments and can be easily automated, for example,
bank transactions processing.

TABLE 9-1 BPM Process Categories
People-intensive Involve a high level of interaction between individuals for routing,
processes approving, and fulfilling requests such as customer service requests,
travel, and purchase requests and usually high rates of exception
handling. Although this type of open-ended process translates into a
need for flexibility on the part of the end user, it doesn’t mean that the
processes can’t be automated in some way, shape, or form.
Decision-intensive They are fairly complex processes that involve gathering and
processes deciphering information and often include mission-critical decision
making as well. A rules engine that sets “if then” rules (e.g., at a
manufacturing company, a rule could be implemented that said:
“notify sales when inventory is lower than 10 and we have more than
five pending orders on a Monday”) is absolutely necessary for this type
of process. Ease-of-information access (i.e., no wasted time in repetitive
searches and minimizing multiple database screens) is just as critical for
employees performing this type of task.
Document-intensive Require users to review documents for approval, enter data from those
processes documents into a back-office system, and make decisions based on the
documents in hand. User activity is driven by information found in
scanned images or electronic forms, or often electronic documents
created in Microsoft Word or other office automation software tools.
Other examples of document-intensive processes include new account
opening and invoice processing.
Integration-intensive They are not only descriptive of a certain type of business activity but,
processes according to the Forrester report, also a goal to aspire to for a company
looking to cut down on wasted operator time in exception handling,
for instance. This means that a best practice in BPM implementations is
always to examine the other three types of processes and look for ways
to improve on or significantly modify the process to get it to an
integration-intensive level.
Source: Adopted from Best Practices in BPM.