In assessing the past year, the manager reviews turnover statistics, the performance of individual departments and the extent to which the business and its staff have met their overall objectives. These help him identify the successes and the less-than-successes - and the reasons for them, so he can identify actions on which to focus in the year to come.

The major strategic decisions are in fact taken at this stage of the year, and managers don’t always have either the time or the systems to facilitate their analysis and inform their decision-making. These days, most of us have at least Excel spreadsheets to ensure there is an audit trail to the business’s turnover and performance, and perhaps systems that measure the quality of the product or service marketed by the business.

However, suppose you want to measure qualitative factors internal to the business? How can you access measurable, reliable and comparable data?

In this context, Business Process Management is a tool that can not only automate processes but also monitor them, and also track the quality of the human intervention in the process. Business Activity Monitoring and reporting systems such as W4 Control Center help to identify weaknesses, and thus make it possible to correct them. They give the manager quantitative data that reflects the qualitative performance of those involved in a process. This data can be a basis for decisions about improving the process concerned.

The manager with a BPM system knows he has the information he needs to assess his team’s performance and can thus assess an activity in a few mouse clicks. He can then focus on his “wish list” for application development based on the business processes. Once the new modules just released are integrated, enabling interfacing to other systems, performing tasks and executing processes will be simplified still further. Creating new reports for the new developments will help in rethinking the strategy, etc.

One thing at least is clear: in the coming year, W4 BPM Suite will continue to be the driver for change that shapes the overall functionality of your various information systems, and the tool that introduces innovation to your processes!