Brief History of Business Process Management (BPM)

The road to Business Process Managemet (BPM) has been difficult one that has gained from the successes and failures of various other attempts at achieving process-based organizational efficiency.


Perhaps it is worthwhile taking a few moments to understand a very brief recent history of management's focus on business processes.
In the 1980s there was a considerable focus on Total Quality Management (TQM). This was followed in the early 1990s by Business Process Reengineering (BPR) as promoted by Hammer and Crampy (1990). BPR had a chequered history, with some excellent successes as well as failures.


Following BPR in the mid and late 1990s, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems gained organizational focus and became the next big thing. These were supposed to deliver improved ways for organizations to operate, and were sold by many vendors as the 'solution to all your problems'. The ERP systems certainly did not solve an organization's process issues, nor make the processes as efficient and effective as they could have been. Towards the end of the 1990s and in the early 2000s, many Customer Relation Management (CRM) systems were rolled out with extensive focus on the customer view and customer experience. While this provided focus on the front office, it did not improve the back-office processes. More recently, Six Sigma has started to come into its own.


According to Hammer (1993), 'Coming up with the ideas is the easy part, but getting things done is the tough part. The place where these reforms die is... down in the trenches' and who 'owns' the trenches? You and I and all the other people. Change imposed on the 'trench people' will not succeed without being part of the evolutionary or revolutionary process:

• Forceful leadership can accomplish only so much. The shift from machineage bureaucracy to flexible, self-managed teams requires that lots of ordinary managers and workers be psychologically prepared.

Fonte: Artigo extraído do livro "Business Process Management - Practical Guidelines to Successful Implementations" - John Jeston and Johan Nelis - págs. 3-4.