Back in the mid 80s I worked on the original Six Sigma team at Motorola.
Soon there after I took a job in Motorola Semiconductor World Marketing to:
"Leverage Six Sigma in the Field".
In reality “World Marketing” was really “Sales”; and “Six Sigma for World Marketing” was really “BPM”. Demand forecasting, change notifications, end of life… Business Processes Impacting Customers.
Funny thing is, in the early 90s BPM was gaining momentum as BPR (which in many ways was really sort of BPA centric).
As far as the acronyms:
BPM = Business Process Management
BPR = Business Process Re-engineering
BPA = Business Process Analysis (as opposed to automation)
As far as the point:
Having done a lot of Analysis and Re-Engineering (the “As-Is” to “Should-Be” approach), I think the early work we did, now enabled by technology, is at the leading edge of best practices enabling inherently agile operational excellence (Arguably the goal of BPM).
I’m not saying that Six Sigma (or what it has evolved into) = BPM
Rather that the basic DMAIC principles of Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control are at the heart of many leading edge BPM initiatives. Rather than decomposing processes and analyzing them in detail, companies are defining business processes at a higher level and using process intelligence (PI) to measure process performance, these measurements are analyzed and a specific part of the process that generates sufficient ROI is improved and controlled. After which the process is further defined, measured, etc… DMAIC’d.
The result, a BPM approach which delivers value in the near term and is “Process” centric in and of itself. This in turn drives not only top and bottom line improvements, but helps to create a company that is much more agile and able to respond to change and opportunity in the marketplace.
