BPM from a Business Point of View

There have been a great many articles addressing the benefits of BPM. The hard costs are more easily identified while soft costs are not.

Efficiency

Hard cost savings include: reduced process cycle times; eliminating manual data entry; and eliminating routing costs.

Soft costs are more difficult to uncover but, since process cycle times are shorter, you could:

- Improve your product designs
- Develop more innovative products
- Improve product quality
- Get to market sooner providing a longer time to reap profits

It seems obvious that a company would be better off if they could actually achieve the listed benefits. The hard part is assigning a dollar value to each.

Effectiveness

Companies are looking into ways to be more effective. They see that they can increase profits if they can improve a process, create a new process or fill a hole that is costing them money.

Some examples...

Walmart has a process in place for managing shipments. If a product is being sent to the northeast [where they have inventory] and a store in the west is out of inventory, they will reroute that shipment to the west immediately. This helps them make sure that they can maximize sales for that product.

There are new companies popping up that manage medical insurance payments. This is an expensive process for insurance companies. They have determined that they can save money by paying quickly and managing discrepencies after the fact.

Why wait to create these advantages for your company?

If you remove non value add activities from your process; if you have a computer perform an activity that a human doesn't need to perform; and if you have a person do what a computer cannot; you will reduce costs. While the economy is struggling to get back on track, now would be a good time to 'just do it'.

Your Thoughts...

What is holding up your BPM project?