Using Business Process Management for Effective and Efficient Quality Management

Abstract

Business Process Management (BPM) and Quality Management (QM) are seldom seen as the perfect way to represent a company’s trustworthiness to customers. Achieving a QM certification (e.g., with the ISO 9001:2015 certificate) can have great value for a company, especially in terms of reputation. However, although promoted by the latest version of the standard, applying BPM is not often considered a way to achieve such a certification, and the collection of necessary information is often costly and tedious. Therefore, we propose a conceptual BPM approach, along with a supporting tool, to be used for effective and efficient QM. We recapitulate the design and development of the icebricks BPM approach and tool and show by means of a concrete consulting project how BPM, especially process modeling, can support the ISO 9001 certification process. During the development and the consulting project, we learned that existing procedure models (possibly with some adaptions) are often not only useful for their described application but can even serve in related undertakings. Therefore, it is always useful to look for existing solutions that may be related to a project. We also learned that simplicity and flexibility of the procedure and the tools are the key factors in successfully applying BPM in an ISO 9001 project. In addition, the development of procedures and tools must be led by real practical assumptions, such as those proposed in DSR, instead of assumptions about a “perfect world,” if they are to be applied in practice.