According to a recent survey by PwC’s strategy consultancy, just under a third (32 percent) of German companies have a clearly defined strategy and 19 percent say they have no strategy at all. Does that surprise you? Furthermore, the majority of German managers are not convinced their corporate strategy can be successful.
The success of corporate management and strategy stands or falls with the holistic management of processes. Process thinking is thus playing an increasingly important role in the context of corporate strategy and is becoming more of a focus for successful companies – or at least it should be! But what does “process thinking” actually mean? Process thinking means thinking in end-to-end processes rather than in hierarchical structures. It’s important that the process goes through different functions in the business. In order to be able to take significant steps to implement the corporate strategy, clear process goals for strategically relevant processes are crucial and these should determine the thoughts and actions of all employees. If a process objective does not support or directly track any strategic business goals, it is not relevant and should be eliminated.
Sustainability through the top-down approach
In general, process goals can be derived top-down from the strategic corporate goals or brought in line with them bottoms-up. Either way, process goals must be fully aligned with the corporate strategy in order to sustainably support the goals of the company. First, the main processes should be depicted in a process map and arranged as core processes along the value chain. After that, underlying processes can be gradually assessed. Focusing on the essentials, with BPM as a top-down approach to control and optimize the delivery of services within the company makes performance measurements more intuitive and meaningful, and allows performance to be judged against corporate goals.
This is also how our customer Jürgen Weiß, Head of Process Management & Benchmarking at Munich Airport sees it:
“With our process management system, we want to make a significant and measurable contribution to process-oriented performance optimization at the airport. I can “paint” processes with many tools. However, our goals lie overall in an integrated management system that maps the different requirements in a single platform. This includes the derivation and control of the process goals from the corporate strategy as well as the integration and control of the GRC components and their interactions. With the integration of all process data in iGrafx, we achieve a corporate platform which allows flexibility and future-proofs the the most diverse requirements for our processes in terms of transparency and documentation, control, as well as operational security. And this is from the individual process participants to the management team.”
I know this is all easier said than done. But thanks to our expertise, iGrafx can support you from strategy to efficient, operational implementation. Our consulting team supports you in introducing process management as an integral part of successful corporate management and continues to help along the way. If you’re interested in learning more, click here.