DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AUTOMATED BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

ABSTRACT
This research work studied the current state of manual operational business processes, their limitations and how business process management system can be used to automate different processes for maximum efficiency and reliability. In the analysis carried out, the major challenges faced by different business organizations that lead to poor adoption of the automated system are limited resources, lack of proper awareness on method of operation, lack of skill sets and fear of the risk involved. In effect of the above challenges, this research designed a management system that can suit any business irrespective of type, skills and size; this was achieved by deploying the application using web and cloud technology which any enterprise can scale with based on their resources and capability. The system designed will help any enterprise to meet up with the demand of the modern day business environment. The business management system is implemented using Hypertext Pre-processor (PHP), Javascript and MySQL Database. The running environment is web server using client-server interaction. Any conversion strategy is suitable to migrate to the developed system but this paper recommends parallel conversion strategy. Three types of testing (unit testing, integration testing and overall system testing) were carried out on the designed system, it was found reliable and standard.

Background of the Study
Business Process Management (BPM) is the discipline that combines knowledge from information technology and knowledge from management sciences and applies this to operational business processes (Wil, 2013). It includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. Over the last decade there has been a growing interest in Business Process Management (BPM). Practitioners have been using BPM technologies to model, improve, and enact business processes.
The demands of good business practices, competition and government regulation constantly push companies to reexamine, update, modernize or replace their business processes (David , 2006). Efficient and effective business processes that meet changing conditions can distinguish an organization from its competition and can be key differentiators.

Business processes often evolve iteratively, beginning as manual, undocumented procedures. As the business environment becomes more complex, a business must continually evolve its processes to remain competitive.
BPM is set to automate all the manual processes which are very tedious, time consuming and inefficient. These manual business operations have been for a while until recently when the dominance of Information Technology began to gain strength in business administration due to its strategic and dynamic management approach. The goal of business remains the same; automation is a means to achieve them with more convenience.
Automating business processes presents a lot of benefits to business managers which are driving their business growth. Its dynamicity has made it to respond to different business needs without compromising accuracy. The greater advantage of the system is its parallelism in handling of business transactions. This parallelism made it to be a time saving system. Speed is achieved through concurrency; a lot of transactions can be carried out at different points of the integrated system at an instance of time without any hiccups.
At the core of the benefits of the automated business system is the efficient data management (easy storage and retrieval of data), which is of greater purpose to business managers. Timely and accurate business reports help managers in decision making and prediction of future occurrences in their business. At the flexibility it offers, core business data and reports can be generated at any place at any point in time. This helps to avoid error in reports as there is none or minimal human intervention in generating this critical business reports that aids in effective decision making.
Automated: is the routine or mundane activities that are performed by computers, whenever possible, for the sake of speed and reliability. Both business and technical in nature, IT processes are a subset of business processes and provide support to larger processes involving both people and machines. End-to-end business processes depend on distributed computing systems that are both transactional and collaborative. Process models may therefore comprise network models, object models, control flows, message flows, business rules, metrics, exceptions, transformations and assignments.

Cost saving is one of the effective impact of automated business systems in running business organizations. With the automated system, the amount of resources consumed in running some administrative affairs of the organization is minimized as the number of experts needed to be employed is reduced. In small businesses that have little resources, they need not to employ highly skillful professionals that require a higher paycheck. They only need an average individual that have the knowledge of the automated system, because the system has taken care of the critical processes.
There have been a poor adoption and low proliferation of these automated business system amidst all the benefits it offers in promoting businesses. The few adoption is by the fortune companies and large businesses while the SMEs are being left behind. In view of this, there are some perceived reasons for poor adoption of this system especially by SMEs. Designing the system dynamically to suite different sizes of business with different nature and resources would be the only way for massive adoption.

The major challenges faced by businesses (especially SMEs) are the cost of operating this automated systems and risk management. It’s obvious that small businesses does not need all the fully integrated modules of automated systems, therefore these businesses will be analyzed to know the core modules that are needed by them to enhance their productivity. Such modules like automated invoicing, stock management system, and decision aided system, etc are the core modules that will enhance their growth efficiently while at the same time reducing cost and risk.

1.2 Statement of the Problem
Business environment has become more complex and evolved in its processes. Businesses are inundated with lots of iterative operations which takes most of their work hours without much contribution to their growth. Manually operating these tedious and time consuming activities in a competitive business world slows down processes and places one behind one’s counterparts.
It takes more effort and physical space to keep track of paper documents, to find information and to keep details secure. When mistakes are made or changes or corrections are needed, often a manual transaction must be completely redone rather than just updated. With manual or partially automated systems information often has to be written down and copied or entered more than once. Systemization can reduce the amount of duplication of data entry.
None of the numerous business processes is worth despising irrespective of their contributions towards growth and expansion, rather automation is the solution for optimization and improved operations, hence the purpose of this work; design and implementation of automated business process management.

1.3 Aim and Objectives of the Study
The aim of this research work is to design an automated business process management system to effectively and efficiently handle business operations and quality control of flow of execution.
The objectives of the research work are listed below:
i. To achieve efficiency in business management.
ii. To reduce cost and increase revenue.
iii. To increase customer satisfaction.
iv. To save time through concurrency.
v. To achieve professionalism in business ethics.
vi. To reduce error and inaccuracy.
vii. To diversify interest in other core business processes.
viii. To achieve growth and expansion.