University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Successful Business Process Management
Book

Successful Business Process Management

What You Need to Know to Get Results

Paula K. Berman
AMACOM, 2014
Buy book or audiobook

Read or listen offline

Amazon Kindle
  • 0.5×
  • 0.75×
  • 1×
  • 1.25×
  • 1.5×
  • 1.75×
1×

Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

Corporations cannot operate efficiently or coherently without standardized procedures and processes. The challenge is to create the right “business-process system” and then to pull together the training resources to teach your staff how to plan, organize, implement and monitor it. Paula K. Berman, a Six Sigma Black Belt, provides a comprehensive overview of business processes and procedures with helpful step-by-step instructions. Berman’s manual is authoritative and informative. Although she advises that business-process documentation should not make readers jump back and forth to comprehend the material, her book suffers some from that flaw. On the plus side, her appendix includes a useful business-procedures template. getAbstract recommends Berman’s advice to executives who must create, plan, manage, rollout, execute, monitor and revise their organization’s procedures, processes and systems.

Summary

Formal Business Processes

A smoothly functioning business process is “a set of interrelated activities designed to transform inputs into outputs...An effective process realizes planned activities and achieves planned results.” Outputs are what you sell to your customers, whether internal or external. Inputs initiate work inside your company, including production. They can be tangible raw materials or intangible assets, such as engineering expertise.

Procedures are the way your firm delivers a process. A “process system” is how your processes work together. Quality business-process systems deliver these benefits:

  • “They provide a model of the business” – The process system maps how your company operates. Once you publish and distribute it, everyone in your firm can share basic assumptions about how your company functions.
  • “They offer a concrete path to follow to meet the business’s core mission” – Quality processes enable your company to create and market your offerings in the most efficient and cost-effective way.
  • “They ensure that interfaces are agreed upon” – Processes and procedures let...

About the Author

Paula K. Berman, a Six Sigma Black Belt, has worked with quality systems at companies of all sizes in a range of industries.

Comment on this summary