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In our first week of our Green Belt Six Sigma class, our instructor introduced the concept of business process management or BPM. BPM analyzes, manages and improves business processes so that they consistently add value to the products or services they create for customers.

This sounds like other quality process improvement schemes, but what distinguishes BPM is that it uses technology to apply a system of metrics at three levels of the business in order to achieve the desired improvements to the business.

At the Business Level, you have metrics that are summaries of operations which sustain the business, or that measure the financial status of the company.

At the Operations Level, you have metrics that increase the efficiency (less cost and time) of the operations as a whole. Identification of root causes starts here.

At the Process Level, you have metrics that measure, control and improve the key factors (or inputs) such as manpower, machinery, and methods of manufacture.

This technology is not necessarily a part of Six Sigma methodology, but can be coupled to it, and the two working in tandem are very powerful. The idea that should be familiar from Six Sigma is that you must have the cooperation of different levels of the organization to make the system work.

You have to sponsors and champions who are aware of the business level, black belts who are aware of the operations level, and the green belts who are aware of the process level. This is why it is referred to sometimes as a holistic management approach because it aligns all levels of an organization.

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