Last month I promised some detail on real-life business process management (BPM) case studies. I heard this one recently at PegaWorld. I admit it interested me because I am a customer of the company, American Home Shield (AHS). In the U.S. (and I think Canada) you might know AHS better as MerryMaids, ServiceMaster, Terminex, TruGreen and similar brands.
AHS is using Pegasystems' BPM software to support service call scheduling, customer follow-up and other customer-facing processes by tying CRM systems together with the backoffice. I was amused because the presenters--Lynda Schirck of AHS and Jeff Akin of Pega--said cancelling a service request is one of the most frequent processes the BPM system has to handle. Guilty as charged; I do it to my AHS technician at least twice a year (out of four possible calls!!)
The presenters' major pieces of advice for those thinking of choosing a BPM-based implementation over ERP or CRM:
- Get the business group to own the project, not IT
- Get partners and even customers involved in changing business processes
- Upgrade the business activity from worklfow to true business processing (I don't agree with their terminology but I talk about making human-centric workflows more straight-through; get the person out of the equation as much as possible in order to--in AHS's case--let the human give better customer service where it is truly needed)
If you are a user of BPM software with an experience you would like to share (or provider of BPM software that would like to suggest a user I could talk to for more blog posts like this), drop me an email at dennis@ebizq.net.
-- Dennis Byron
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