No one today would dream of questioning the role of processes as a key building block of enterprise architecture. But viewed as a strictly architectural element, they still serve in many companies even now solely as a method for determining and documenting procedures, interfaces, and assignment responsibilities. Beyond a doubt, process documentation is an important foundation for the design of procedures in the company, but process management – when limited to nothing more than process documentation – succeeds only conditionally in making a contribution to value creation.

Optimize processes – why? 

Process management can do a lot more! If we look more closely at management models such as the EFQM model for business excellence (see Figure 1), it quickly becomes apparent that the business processes are the link between the management of the company’s capabilities on the one hand and the company results on the other. The capabilities are the fine-tuning knobs in corporate management which impact corporate success.

Figure 1 shows that processes are the “hinge” between enablers and results. It is essential for a company’s success that the business processes are understood as key enablers because this is where management targets are turned into measurable company results. Processes can exert strong leverage, and companies need to discover and utilize this effect. In this sense, the continuous measurement of process performance and optimization of business processes is one of the most important tasks of (process) management. Processes as a key value factor are virtually always at the focal point when the question about the points in the company where optimization can be conducted arises.