“In determining the right people, the good-to-great companies placed greater weight on character attributes than on specific educational background, practical skills, specialized knowledge, or work experience.” – Jim Collins
The modern market has emerged as the pre-eminent arena of trade and commerce – a phenomenon fuelled by ideas, constructs, imperatives, evolving strategies, tech-driven disruptions, new thought, and the overriding presence of the profit motive. Competitive markets, owing to their very nature, also demand innovation in terms of ideating, developing, and applying insights and intelligence to the warp and weft of business processes. Against this backdrop, the concept of business process orientation has taken shape in minds of analysts and business operators. The concept “suggests that firms could enhance their overall performance by adopting a process view of the organization.” Observers have mulled this, and their views are corroborated by results that indicate “business process orientation leads to better non‐financial performance, and indirectly to better financial performance.” Having said that, business process orientation must find initial representation and subsequent expression within the spaces of flow-based diagrams.
- Deploying Human Intelligence
Process orientation “means focusing on business processes, rather than emphasizing functional structure or hierarchy.” Therefore, business operators may elect to examine or re-examine the structure and nature of business processes. This could entail a detailed interrogation of process maps through the agency of flowcharts. These diagrams also remain instrumental in enabling business operators to focus on the fine print that underlines the concepts of business process orientation. For instance, operators of e-commerce ventures could utilize human intelligence to reinforce the support structures of existing business models. This may involve reviewing commercial relationships with vendors, contractors, distributors, mass-market operators, customers, business partners, and more. Such an initiative could be etched in detail within the spaces of flowcharts, enabling e-commerce operators to redefine and reinforce their competitive edge.
- The Multi-Faceted Concept
The idea of business process orientation has emerged as a multi-dimensional concept, one that demands re-engineering at various levels of the modern organization. Organizations may undertake to review the role of process owners, document the moving parts of various business processes, and evaluate the commitment levels of management teams toward business process orientation. In addition, a broad sweep of this concept would include applying continuous process improvement methodologies to business systems, processes, and sub-processes – as also the creation of mechanisms and techniques that enable firms to measure the scope of process performance. Analysts could develop these ideas through flowcharts and allied diagrams, and subsequently examine the impact of change on the outcomes generated by business processes.
- Innovation is Key to Success
Certain observers indicate that emphasis on innovation should serve as the core driver of initiatives designed for business process orientation. This stance stems from observations that describe innovative behavior as a force multiplier in terms of boosting process design and process performance. For instance, certain lines of innovation could find implementation in the stances about human resource management and development in modern organizations. In this instance, management teams could adopt an integrated view of work processes, and position human power at the core of process performance. This stance, in turn, could include a variety of subsidiary stances that promote interactions between human and material components of processes. Readers may view these techniques as various expressions of business process orientation undertaken from an enlightened business perspective – one that seeks to position the primacy of processes over traditional paradigms that center on hierarchy and the conventions of commerce.
- The Role of Management Teams
Management teams can approach the concept of business process orientation through a matrix that includes – devising the outlines of improving the structures of processes, evaluating the risks attendant on such ventures, developing alternative processes to boost business outcomes, and assessing the scope of examining the outcomes of improvements. Under this technique, managers and supervisors could participate in developing flowchart diagrams; these constructs can help develop various aspects of the matrix detailed above. Specialists and process operators, on their part, could invest in such ventures to elevate the idea of business process orientation. Their inputs could assist in refining the various modes of orientation applied to businesses. Additionally, management teams could apply insights gained from past projects, and integrate these into the development tactics of the strategy designed through the agency of connected diagrams.
- The Primacy of Knowledge, Know-How
The structures of knowledge and know-how underlying business processes could represent a focus of initiatives designed to drive business process orientation. Readers may note that the binary of knowledge and know-how operates at the center of process design and operation; therefore, an examination of the structures of knowledge remains essential to such ventures. For instance, the modern white-collar organization could consider investing in extensive initiatives of knowledge development as part of driving business process orientation projects. Similarly, manufacturing concerns could implement new technologies through collaboration with foreign partners, as an expression of overhauling knowledge structures associated with this industry. Execute these lines of ideation within the spaces of flow-based diagrams, thereby allowing new flows of knowledge to enrich and expand the implementation of business process orientation programs.
- The Customer-centric Focus
A sharp focus on the requirements of customers – this stance could potentially upgrade ideation on business process orientation and its subsequent implementation in modern enterprises. In this scenario, operators of enterprise could position the customer at the center of process re-engineering initiatives to anticipate the future requirements of various customer segments. This stance could necessitate an evaluation of the financial outcomes when businesses adopt and pursue a customer-centric perspective. The idea of customer needs to be an expansive one – an idea that includes current and future generations of buyers and clients. Hence, the idea of business process orientation must be implemented at different levels of the enterprise, a task enabled by the extensive use of flowcharts designed to promote the original ideation.
- Surveying Locations for Improvement
Readers may view opportunities for improvement as “bottlenecks, delays, waste, or difficulties in exchanging information that can make processes less efficient.” Therefore, the contemporary enterprise can embark on business process orientation with a specific focus on improving the performance of processes. A variety of key performance indicators remains instrumental in operationalizing this stance, and therefore readers may envisage flowcharts that spotlight the opportunities for improvement in processes, and establish the presence of key performance indicators. Additionally, such instances of connected diagrams could include suggestions that emerge from data-driven analyses of business processes. Data could play a key role in spurring such ventures, allowing enterprises to implement intelligent insights into process operations – thereby positioning the organization to gain higher returns on investments.
- To Conclude
Readings of these texts can enrich our perspectives on the value of business process orientation in contemporary commercial landscapes. It would help to ideate through multiple editions of flowcharts, and embellish each edition with explorations of ideas, techniques, and the application of these to achieve specific objectives. The idea of process re-engineering could be nested within the headline topic, thereby enabling complex versions of orientation to take shape. In addition, organizations may elect to classify processes into primary and support entities in a bid to extract the maximum value from each operation. The flowchart and its native spaces could assist these ventures to attain fruition, thereby reinforcing our faith in the value of these constructs.
