Successfully navigating BPM projects

Introduction

It is a well-known fact that automation without process changes results in only marginal performance improvement. It is also true with process improvements without automation. When business and IT leaders collaborate and improve end-to-end business processes, the resulting benefits are many times higher than the routine cost reduction initiatives. Hence, organisations are increasingly looking at Business Process Management as a tool to increase competitiveness, develop business agility, increase process efficiency and reduce cycle times. According to Gartner, investment in BPM suites is literally twice the growth rate of legacy packaged enterprise applications. Clearly BPM has gained traction.

There are a number of vendors, some offering a plethora of tools that are integrated into a BPM Suite, and others offering the necessary tools in a seamlessly unified environment. All of the vendors see service oriented architecture as a necessary pre-requisite for a successful BPM strategy. Most vendors advocate a more agile methodology of quick, iterative projects and support continuous improvement.

This paper aims to help organisations make a successful start to their BPM journey. Here we summarise key learning from our experience. For more information on this topic please contact us by email.

Why BPM?

Today’s businesses operate in a different world than the 80s and 90s when many business systems were developed. Legacy systems are often data-centric as well as product or function centric; not designed to be customer facing. They are also cumbersome to change. Business today demands constant change, and with ever shortening change cycles, customers and suppliers expect to interact via multiple channels and there is an increasing demand for self-service and strait-through processing. In this world, new, smarter systems are needed to accommodate rapid changes in the business processes spanning multiple legacy systems.  These systems also need to be able to accept input from a variety of new sources (e.g. web services, data-feeds, internet, forms, call centres and other applications etc). 

To achieve this agility, organisations are beginning to adapt BPM approaches and tools. Focus is shifting from applications to managing and optimising business processes. In addition to the operational efficiency, businesses are looking for process agility, which is the ability to change operations, and the way it’s people and systems work, to adapt to change.

BPM use process models to coordinate the interactions between people, systems, policies, and information. A process centric approach has clear advantages. Transactional applications have hard-wired process elements and business logic that are slow to change. Secondly business processes are rarely completed within a single application. A process layer allows processes to be clearly defined, measured and refined. It allows quick changes to process without significant code changes. It also facilitates further automation by filling gaps and linking together applications. This allows greater value to be extracted from existing investment in applications and people.