In today’s economic climate companies are looking for the most efficient way to conduct business. Saros is providing its clients a Lean software system designed to facilitate optimizing business processes and assure that all users know what they should be working on and when to support the company’s best practices. Below is a diagram of the major components of our unique process oriented approach to modeling and managing business processes:

• Business Process Model (BPM) – captures a company’s best practices and corporate knowledge in a data definition of key business processes. Included in this definition are the required tasks to complete a given process, the relationships between tasks and processes, user responsibilities, work areas where tasks are performed, and company specific business rules that govern task selection and scheduling. This is created and maintained by authorized administrative users through a web based setup application.
• Required Process Activities (RPA) – defines what user assigned day-to-day business process tasks must be completed and when to support the best practices represented in the BPM. These tasks are linked to supporting operational data automatically imported from appropriate source. Example sources are ERP system, data warehouse, access database, and Excel files. Each user accesses and inputs information through web based intuitive software tailored to a company’s needs.
• Initiate New Business Process - Each time a new business process is initiated (a sales order is entered for example) a set of tasks required to complete that process are automatically created and stored in the Required Process Activities (RPA).
• Business Process Analysis (BPA) – Regularly analyzes planned user tasks and available resource to identify future resource constraints and other defined problems before they happen. Encountered potential problems are communicated automatically in the form of alert tasks, emails, and/or text messages. A “what if” analysis is included to test the impact of various potential solutions.

Key benefits include:

• Track and monitor your current business processes “real time” assuring that each process is being conducted as designed. For example a sales order process and other supporting processes are optimized to improve on time shipments and minimize associated costs. Each key employee in your organization knows precisely what they should be working on and in what priority to most efficiently support the company objectives. This minimizes the learning curve for new employees, improves quality through consistent process, and minimizes “things dropping through the cracks”.
• The business process analysis assures that a company’s management can look forward to take proactive actions to minimize the impact of the inevitable exceptions to even the best made plans.
• Enforces best practices by enabling management to quickly identify through dashboards and detail drill downs where bottlenecks or shortcomings in the overall company operations exist.
• Eliminate tedious manual systems based around spreadsheets and other independent tools currently used to convert the great amounts of available business data to concise information. At the same time improve the quality of this information used by employees to support their jobs and make good decisions.
• Tie in remote locations, suppliers, and customers to the applicable processes to assure real time feedback.
• When a consultant is completed with their project or an internal company expert leaves unexpectedly, their knowledge of company best practices remains captured in the BPM without the usual drop off in performance.
• Since activities are directed by task listings, management becomes focused on perfecting the BPM and making good strategic decisions, rather than getting caught up in expediting and problem solving.
• The ability to document process related improvements in the BPM assure that process upgrades are incorporated in day-to-day activities, thus supporting the Lean objective of continuous improvement.