Wednesday, January 25, 2012

10 Point Program for BPM Excellence

What really makes for BPM project success? Visualizing a lean and efficient business structure, or how to “Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast!”

  1. First, identify a few processes that are costing the company’s bottom-line, increasing turnaround times or represent a compliance risk.
  2. Put together a think tank of subject matter experts, process owners and forward thinking individuals from your organization to draw up a new goal based process.
  3. Look at your internal technical skill set and various platforms in your IT landscape and evaluate BPMS tools from vendors that fit well with your existing IT investment.
  4. Choose a BPM software vendor to develop an initial proof of concept (POC).
  5. Run and test the process. Revise, revise, revise till you get it right.
  6. Measure the new process for KPIs which are key to your business – common measurement indicators are cycle times, cost implication and customer satisfaction.
  7. Deploy the process and continuously monitor the Business Activity for improved achievement on overall governance aims and better customer offerings.
  8. Synchronize and Collaborate with teams on potential ideas for competing in the market and use these as BPM opportunities to scale up your BPM initiative.
  9. Consider integrating your BPM software with your existing ERP system and extend the bandwidth of your process optimization tool.
  10. Leverage organizational knowledge and market intelligence to constantly update your process with a trial and deploy methodology.
Redirecting resources to find and close business opportunities, rather than spend time looking for information spells Operational efficiency and results in better bottom lines.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Future Forward! - BPM Futuristic Trends

Future Forward - BPM Futuristic Trends :

How can Business Process Management optimize business outcomes and performance? Last year’s leading BPM events and the views aired therein by the industry’s thought leaders all bring out a dominant and somewhat worrying scenario – after a decade, Process Agility is still a pipe dream for organizations struggling to connect BPM technologies with their real world business processes.

Companies continue to focus on process automation as the quick fix to achieving Business Process Management goals without clearly defining end performance parameters and process improvement metrics. There is a need then to step back from the blinding array of available BPMS and concentrate on building operational resilience achieved through continuously introducing new process incidents for goal fulfilment and performance measurement. The need is also to identify a set of techniques that allow people, processes and information systems to adapt to changing patterns repeatedly.

The success words for the future of BPM include Activity Monitoring and Business Intelligence – a greater shift towards “predictive” instead of the “reactive” models being followed; Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Business Event Support as an important aspect of any full service BPM platform whilst evaluating best fit BPMS by organizations. BPM platforms with a strong focus on BAM, will come out on top by providing the critical visibility today’s embattled organizations need to establish relevant business goals and accountability.

The road this year will organically lead to social BPM - an ideal scenario where knowledge workers and partners model collaborative processes and BPMS designs address needs of unstructured process such as those that rest with knowledge workers. . As organizations begin to see the light about creating structures that are operationally resilient, BPMS as a technology takes a back seat. Key features of BPMS that support real world company goals for operational intelligence such as BAM and Process Designers for continuous process improvement take to the forefront of BPM as a solution to achieve operational success.

Business transformation has emerged as the key to sustaining organizational success and there is negligible concern on technology issues. Processes as a platform must necessarily come to pass as more and more users are vested in the belief that processes will eventually run in the cloud (both public and private).

The economic downturn has everyone looking inward and setting the house in order. Going forward, structured process automation will slowly give way to process management for unstructured processes – harnessing knowledge repositories within enterprises.

The emerging face of BPM extends accountability to process management as the means to optimize business outcome. This means that BPMS needs to keep pace as organizations start adapting process at the pace of business changes and not at the pace of their BPM package!