Ever wondered whether your company should address their business processes? Many of you believe that managing business processes is a good idea, but it is too expensive. So, let's look at some reasons to address your business processes.
My Thoughts...
Looking to contain costs?
The 'ax man' approach is likely to leave gaping holes in your business processes. BPM provides the management disciplines and the tools to surgically target problem processes and put them on the path to recovery. Improve your business processes and cut costs at the same time.
Looking to improve customer relationships?
Everyday we interact with companies - we give them the opportunity to meet or exceed expectations. Our experience with a company determines whether we will buy from them again or whether this will be a one time sale. Customer expectations management is a process that BPM is well suited to manage.
Looking for more visibility into your company processes?
Do your managers complain about the lack of visibility into their processes and projects? Do you have trouble identifying who or what is impeding your processes? Does it take hours to determine the status of a process? Have you hired a program manager to solve this problem? BPM software provides visibility.
Looking for more control of your business processes?
Are the cycle times of some of your high value processes taking too long? Are the people involved in the process spending too much time looking for information; looking for the descriptions of their next activity; determining the next person in the process; etc? BPM software brings control to your business processes.
Looking for improved agility?
Do you fear that your processes are not adapting to changing business requirements because 'this is the way they have always been done'? Using BPM, a company is better equipped to switch gears and respond to its changing business environment - faster than its competitors.
Your Thoughts...
What would you change or add to the list?
Process Management - Keeping it Real!
Scott,
Your points/questions on costs, visibility, control, and agility are all spot on. My take is that nearly every organization can benefit from improving and automating processes.
The question isn't should they BPM or not, but rather how do they BPM. Dennis Byron raises this question in in this post questioning the need for Lean BPM.
I've seen our customers (I'm from Serena Software) adopt a lean approach to BPM where they remove the bloat of traditional BPM projects in order to get process-centric applications online faster and at a fraction of the cost of traditional BPM implementations.
To get back to your question, though, many of our customers have adopted lean BPM in order to prove compliance--to either regulatory requirements (think, PCI DSS, 21 CFR Part 11, OMB A-123, etc.), or internal practices (think Lean Six Sigma, CMMi Level 4, PMBOK, etc.). So "Need to prove compliance?" is one I would add.
Thanks,
Tim
Scott,
I think that other important point is to improve compliance, normally these increases the tasks and time in the process, but with bpm and soa you can automatize these and combined with the increase of visibility you could increase the compliance!!
upsss, i just read the comments of Tim, they are in the same way of mine!! great!!