If there is one single technology that could introduce a lot of efficiencies and effectiveness improvements in companies, it is BPMS software. They can tie together, the many disparate systems used to execute business processes within a company!
Ask even the most IT savvy company what their typical cycle time is for an Order-to-Cash process or Order-to-Shipping process and you will draw a blank. Processes within companies evolve and they just exist with all of their inefficiencies and ineffectiveness intact for long periods. Automating badly designed processes only instituitionalize these bad processes and put lipstick on these pigs to begin with!
In fact, if anything Lean Thinking teaches us is that for any process to improve, you first need to expose the process in all its glory, its strengths and more particularly , its weaknesses.
Many times, processes are that way because someone initially just designed them that way in an ad-hoc way and "that's how things have always been done"!
Processes in many companies are run with glue and sticks, literally! This is not because of anything sinister, but just because of evolution of computing within the company. They first started using, say SAP Manufacturing and then came Oracle Financials and then may be Oracle/PeopleSoft for HR and other functions. Making information and processes go from one functional module to another is painful at the least! They are not designed to talk to each other easily, often even from the same vendor!
BPMS packages promise the glue that binds all of the various disparate systems and provide you with some sense of a process flowing from department to department!
Moreover, almost every major corporation around the globe has stripped manual, human- judgement related tasks from these processes and outsourced them, most likely to some company within the same shores and in 10% or so cases, Offshore! When it comes to Outsourcing, people immediately visualize some sweatshop in India or China slaving over documents. Reality is that most large corporations outsource 90% of their manual processes to some outfit within the same shore!
Nevertheless, now you have an external third party company and their IT systems in the BPMS mix.
BPMS packages have been struggling with competing BPM standards and somewhat not mature because of that. Secondly, the economic forces are pulling them away from their promised improvements as in the case of outsourcing above.
BPMS packages have a lot of promise and can contribute to making companies lean and mean. However practical problems prevent their widespread use, bringing them just short of all their promise!
Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one - Albert Einstein
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