BPM and Compliance

Today I attended to Conference in Milan, from Business International, related to the BPM & Compliance...

I rcved their invitation and it was a pleasure for me to be there, even if I had to leave before the lunch 'cause, as usual, I had too many things to do in my office...

Here the extract from the Conference :

BUSINESS PROCESS
E COMPLIANCE MANAGEMENT
Come rivedere i propri processi per rispondere ai cambiamenti normativi e alle situazioni di incertezza dettate dalla crisi:
esperienze a confronto.

Come coniugare le esigenze di compliance con gli obiettivi di business
● La gestione integrata dei processi per assicurare la compliance normativa
● Come modellare e rivedere i processi per rispondere alle nuove esigenze di riduzione dei costi
● L’importanza dei principi Lean-Six Sigma per la strategia aziendale, l’efficienza ed efficacia nei processi ed il miglioramento continuo
● Il ruolo dell’Internal Audit e del Compliance Officer per l’ottimizzazione dei processi

SPEAKERS

► Luciano Giannini, Corporate Development Director, di Italcementi
► Michele Pintus, Compliance Officer, di ABB
► Antonella Pontillo, Responsabile Organizzazione, Poste Vita
► Antonio Denes, Life Cycle Manager, Janssen-Cilag (Johnson & Johnson)
► Tiziano Peparini, Organization development Manager, di Arval Service Lease Italia

Most of the meeting regarded how to use the BPM metodology to achieve Compliance requirement and viceversa.

I mean, it is clear that in strong "to be Compliance" company where the Compliance is a must (dlgs 231 for risk Basilea II, dlgs 262) it is the first sponsor for a BPM project.Most of the "platea", indeed, was internal auditor, compliance manager and so on...

Another common word related to BPM is "Governance" 'cause usually BPM project is used to be TopDown and it is strictly related to the internal Governance.

In general referring to a BPM it's something more then just a project, it's something then involve all the company and in most cases (based on the aim/scope of the "process") all the employees. For this reason, personally I prefer to call "BPM process" that honestly sound a bit strange ... as "Business Process Management Process" but it's clear enough for me !

First speech from ItalCementi was interested enough 'cause basically he defined the logic they used to start the project and it was strictly related to the "To Do" list I extracted in short :

1) Define the scope of the process and it means in this case to define the boundaries of the job.(related to compliance, to Governance, both, only main processes..)

2) Define the granularity of the details u want to achieve

3) Define the job description adding the processes, as per max granularity defined above, that the employee is responsible for. At the same time u have to define which are the KAIs and KPIs (in terms of what need to be achieved) related to the job profile

Basically the methodology they used was to define the process in terms of :

1) INPUT

2) PROCESS

3) OUTPUT

4) CUSTOMER (internal or external)

Another aim/result of the BPM process was to define the Best Practices for Project Management and it's typical of project like that. They created the related intranet (it's quite strange enough that most of the time before BPM process an intranet is not used so far), put inside all the process using a web based tool.

They didn't used BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and this is strange so far, 'cause most of the today BPM process need to use it to be compliance itself with the standard already used in US and rest of EU.

In short BPMN, developed from OMG and BPMI) is the "classical" graphical notation specifically designed to "coordinate the sequence of processes and the messages that flow between different process participants in a related set of activities." (Read more on www.bpmn.org). The main difference is that it's a standard that in few years will be used in any BPM process.

Last speech I saw was from an interesting brasilian guy, Antonio Denes, that explain the Lean Six Sigma Methodology used in his BPM process.

Last months we spoke in my company too much about Lean Six Sigma (in terms of manufacturing) that has main aim to improve continually (waste reduction, zero defects.. and so on)

Most of the pressure was put on the measure ex ante and ex post and on the empowerment of the team result…. based on the William Edwards Deming theory ….

Quite interesting… could really BPM be adopted in a typical nordest Italian SMB (aka PMI).My answer ? Yes of course, step by step, hard work, with strong commitment… it can be done .