Businesses have to exert considerable effort to avoid the heavy penalties in Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA and stay in line with Truth in Advertising requirements. But doing so with Business Process Management solutions can yield considerable cost savings and competitive advantages far beyond compliance, industry experts agree.

During the ebizQ webinar Reaping Rewards Through Compliance, part of the BPM and the Real Time Enterprise series sponsored by CommerceQuest, ebizQ Vice President for Strategic Services Beth Gold-Bernstein and CommerceQuest Chief Process Officer Ken Morris detailed strategies that enable enterprises to both comply with laws and “beat the pants off their competition.”

Companies “expect these mandated solutions to cost them money, but all of a sudden (the solutions are) saving them money, and that’ the exciting news here,” Gold-Bernstein pointed out. “So (for example), if you start out off with a Sarbanes-Oxley solution, since you must control the (related processes), it gives you the opportunity to see what other processes you can control to enable this ROI.”

It’s a trend directly responsible for Morris’ newly established CPO position. “We believe everything is a process, so we elevated to C-level the process officer job,” he explained. “The job is really to design, develop, analyze, improve and control the processes that exist in the company that involve every component of the organization, not just within the four walls, but with suppliers, business partners and customers.”

Gold-Bernstein outlined case studies of organizations that that reduced personnel, IT, and business costs while increasing revenues. They included:

--A HIPAA implementation that provided Blue Cross and Blue Shield of California its first ROI from a mandated solution.

-- A Canadian transportation company that saved nearly $1.6 million by eliminating nearly 80,000 hand-processed transactions, reducing cost-per-order from $25 to $5.

-- A high-tech manufacturer that used RosettaNet to cut error rates by 85 percent and achieve a 100 percent ROI in the first year.

-- An electronics distribution company that halved new-partner set-up costs while eliminating the need for senior-level systems professionals to participate in the process.