The importance of business process management in optimizing the customer-supplier relationship

The appearance and spreading of concepts of value chain, supply chain, business process reengineering, strategic alliances, etc. all reflect the strengthening of the process orientation and the growing importance of internal and external integration, the conversion from functional organisation to process management.

The project Business Process Management and Competitiveness study the competitiveness of companies, functional areas and internal processes, appearing as the basic elements of a company.

Companies consider the lack of financial resources and taxation as the main obstacles to innovation.

They gave more importance to these factors than to the company’s own capacities; they may overemphasise the effect of external factors, though it is sign that we must consider. Nowadays, the majority are forced to face limited resources.

The growing importance of quality is marked by quality being the number one goal of products development.

Today this may be the challenge affecting the companies most directly, even a simple supplier relation forces the company to do constant technical development if it wants to fulfil quality requirements in the long run.

Definition of BPM - Business Process Management, that is to say "Business Process Management": this consists of analyzing the various primary, secondary and support processes of the company in order to improve them. The BPM continuous improvement cycle is based on five stages:

• Analysis of the current process situation.
• Optimization of these processes.
• Process modeling using BPM software (free and online for example.)
• Automation of business processes.
• Monitoring to detect faults and re-optimize processes.

BPM is therefore essential for at least three reasons:

- Communication:

The significant contribution of the BPM system in terms of communication lies in the awareness of the importance of listening to the market and listening to the customer. The first is essential because it must be perceived as the fundamental origin of the activity because we do not manufacture an object that nobody needs. The second, because it is a reflection of customer satisfaction and, if necessary, customer loyalty (it is never useless to point out that it is more effective to retain customers rather than systematically seeking new ones.)

- The search for efficiency:

The BPM tool to manage internal processes for an efficient customer-supplier relationship. The concept of internal customer is not necessarily easy to understand. Internal customer satisfaction can be a good method of continuous improvement. This concept is easier to visualize. Indeed, each service or each process is the client of the upstream services or processes. Their satisfaction must be taken into account to improve productivity. The more we listen to our customers, the more we are able to meet their needs. So, for an internal customer, this corresponds to facilitate their activity and for an external customer-supplier relationship, to creating trust (and therefore, generating turnover by spending less).

- Interface management :

A more global view is often necessary to find retention points, gaps, and above all the improvements that will facilitate the organization of the structure. Analysis and discussion with pilots make perfect sense to detect their points during the process review.

The BPM tool allows me to better manage the internal organization of the company, to have simple and explicit processes and an optimized customer-supplier relationship.