BPM – Why Not??

BPM is a management approach that is available for anyone in the business market:  any company, institution or enterprise. However, for some reason, there are companies that did not implement this management strategy yet. Sometimes the reasons for not adopting a BPM approach are related to economic issues of BPM platforms, but the real problem should be: how good are the BPM tools that you are adopting?

So, if BPM is available for everyone, it would be interesting to discuss why companies don´t adopt this management strategy. Maybe it has to do with the developers and sellers of BPM tools. Maybe they don’t explain very well the benefits of these strategy and their investment return, they don’t demonstrate the usability of BPM tools and how it really changes the company processes and therefore the client’s satisfaction.

When the client takes the initiative to try one of the BPM tools available on the market the seller should adapt his strategy in order to persuade the customer and allow him to try the product. It is at this point that the client has the first experience with the product and it should be satisfactory! The consumer will try to analyze it properly and assimilate all the advantages of this new business tool.

As expected, the reaction is not the same for all customers. There are some people that enjoy the platform and intend to immediately implement it but others can’t easily see the benefits and the return of the invested amount. This is the normal operation of the market and it is at this stage that the art of selling is put to test.

Companies need to think more about the BPM approach and how they can implement it on their processes. There should be a market research about the best BPM tools available, their pros and cons and its value for money.


3 Compelling Reasons to Implement a BPMS

As with many IT professionals, I was first attracted to BPM by the capabilities offered by BPMS technology to increase business agility and reduce costs. Working as an IT Director, I identified two compelling reasons to invest in a BPMS. The first was that it offered a low cost and effective solution for automating administrative business processes, thus reducing operating costs. I secondly saw it as an effective solution to achieve a stated business aim of continuously improving processes at low cost, where the pace of change would be rapid.
A third compelling reason has recently emerged; using a BPMS to meet increasing business demand to complete business processes via mobile devices. Let’s look at each reason in more detail, so I can explain my conclusion that all senior IT professionals should give serious consideration to implementing a BPMS to increase agility, even if they don’t plan to embrace wider BPM principles.

Compelling reason 1 – A BPMS supports rapid and low cost automation of business processes Against the current macro-economic background, businesses are looking for ways to reduce costs whilst not degrading their ability to offer quality service. Automation achieves this by decreasing staff involvement in processes whilst creating a consistent and quality service experience. Extend automation with real time reporting and well-designed escalations and management effort will also switch from monitoring work queues to identifying further cost saving opportunities.
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Compelling reason 2 –BPMS technology increases the pace of application change processes If you work in a senior IT management position it is almost inevitable that you are faced with business users complaining that change requests take too long to implement or that they never get their change prioritized even though it is only small in size. It is also common to be told that the last project didn’t deliver everything that was needed, even though it was signed off as meeting all requirements before implementation, and additional change is now urgently required.
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Compelling reason 3 –BPMS technology exposes business processes to mobile apps at low cost With increasing consumerisation of IT, expectations are being raised at an incredible rate. Requests to IT are no longer limited to providing a windows client or an intranet based application. Business users now expect to execute business processes on their mobile devices.
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Summary I believe that a key behavior of an agile business is its ability to implement decisions taken against emerging opportunities or threats, rapidly and with confidence of execution. For an IT Director, this means being confident of delivering functionally rich applications, available on any device, that meets business requirements, again and again.
For the reasons outlined in this article, I believe that when senior IT professionals consider the potential benefits offered by leading BPMS solutions, they will be attracted to their many capabilities, even if they are not interested in BPM.

See original article at BPMInstitute.org


Future with BPM: Cost Vs Benefits & Strategies

A Prominent factor of international business today is its strategic direction.  Global firms are competing with a wider variety of business and operational strategies and with more complex operational strategies today compare to 12 years before.

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Under global operational strategy to concentrate geographically located activities in a way that captures most of the available economies of scale and factor cost advantages.

BPM Vs ROI

BPM considers processes to be strategic assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and improved to deliver value added products and services to clients. The need of optimization and streamline the operational activities for global companies are historical.

Here are some of the facts:

  • There is no clear formula or mathematical model available for exact mapping of cost associated with BPM/Dependent projects and ROI. Benefits are multi-dimensional compare to single direction.
  • ROI is a critical factor for any larger corporation/ senior management to know before approving any BPM related investment as its not in critical path of company success.
  •  Major corporations/companies understand the needs/benefits of optimal strategies for operating models to save cost. But don’t want to invest on BPM due to unknown ROI.
  • There are initial up front cost associated with BPM installation and adopting this model.

Determining ROI & NPV for BPM: Tracking direct benefits in terms of cost saving for short term (1 Year) and long term (5 year) period.

  •  Improvement to operating structure/efficiency due to BPM,
  •  Reduction in day to day breaks, failures, rework compare to previous year,
  •  Optimized staffing model consist of reallocation of roles and responsibilities( globally or low cost area) as Business Process Modeling exercise
  • Reduction in risk exposure with more control points determined with help of BPM
  • Standard and enhanced End – 2 – End detailed process maps to reflect companies’ policies and procedural (Direct saving on External/internal audits & Time spend on audits with reduced exceptions).

Tracking In-direct Benefits in terms of cost saving

  • Due to more standardized documentation and process mapping, Ease of change management or future enhancements as indirect benefit
  • Centralized location of Policies & Procedures with details End – 2 – End mapping for cross reference.
  • Direct contact and interaction with IT and business staff due to seamless integration.
  • Ease of brining “New client on-board” and developing new strategies to accommodate need of clients.
  • Centralized Business analysis & Project Management efforts with more control.
  • Expansion of BPM model to other department with minimal efforts and reduced external expertise.
  • Regulatory and compliance benefits and support to compliance certifications.

Adoption and Best Practices

It’s always advisable to incorporate BPM for detail analysis and integration of operation – technology is to take “incremental approach” at enterprise level.

Biggest obstacle for adopting BPM are “Culture, resources, funding” because for larger organization where multiple division need to coordinate for initial roll-out.

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Fonte:  http://www.bpminstitute.org/resources/articles/future-bpm-cost-vs-benefits-strategies


iFlow BPM Platform

 iFlow BPM is a solution developed for a fast workflow execution and edition, following the BPM methodology.

This innovative BPM platform works as open source licensing system and adapts itself to the most different companies and user’s needs, enables the integrations with diverse software, has null platform costs and allows a quick and easy flows design using BPMN language. IFlow BPM guarantees the development of processes without need of solid knowledge base of IT and BPMN. Continue reading