BPM projects have been positioned as strategic initiatives to differentiate from competitions, to bring effectiveness and efficiency while serving client needs, to bring flexibility/ agility to market change, to striving for innovation and many others…
Many a times our customers become short sighted and entirely depend on technology to solve all of their problems. However, technology should enable them to succeed; and BPM can really bring people & technology together to complete meaningful transactions to fulfill client needs effectively.
Good news is that, BPM allows an organization to re-invent itself, it’s business processes, identify key business processes for clients which needs to be optimized, improved, monitor on regular basis….
Discussion is no more limited to tasks, activities, input, output, departments…. Discussion is around holistic view of an organization and it’s processes. How can an organization bring innovation on business processes? can the business process be changed rather simplified without impacting the end result and client. Simplification should be one of the objectives while implementing BPM. Simple automation of existing process aka digitization never helps. One of our banking customer tried to automate the process by exactly replicating the manual process (even digital version of same forms) as part of their BPM initiative; and there was no takers for the new system. This is merely a digitization exercise and not BPM. This made even more cumbersome to use the system; which could have simplified by re-using information already collected in other function areas, aggregating data…. This whole exercise requires a whole lot of THINKING from all possible angles.
I also absolutely agree that BPM is still a game changer if it is planned and executed properly. It always makes sense to see if the same process can be defined from scratch. Our primary aim would be to reduce waste by removing non value added tasks from the flow. I am a big fan of one of the lean concept called “Blue Sky Thinking”, which allows brain storming or creative thinking among the team members to bring fresh ideas to tired old problems. While working with one of our manufacturing customer, we realized that existing business process complexity (in term of number of steps) and cycle time could be reduced by 50% to 60% by thinking out-of-box approach from scratch. It is always advisable to unlearn the process knowledge; and invite a third party consultant to help re-engineering the process.
Typical BPM implementation exercise follow the following life cycle: Understand project objectives from business point of view; how this can improve my customer’s experience, business benefits in term of revenue, profitability, effectiveness, productivity gain etc. How this can be Measured (driving KPIs). Analyze key business process to be part of this change, improvement areas etc.. How this can be controlled or monitored in terms of real time performance check, dashboard monitors etc.? Plan for continuous improvements, agility to change as per market demand or customer needs.
This approach is aligned with any other Total Quality Management and goes a step further by enabling continuous changes, real time monitoring through technology implementation.
Another learning I wanted share is; software tool should be the last piece of entire jigsaw puzzle; and should not become the bottleneck for this change exercise. Many of the BPM implementations across the globe, have failed because of the fact that; software tools have been “force fit” to enable business process modeling and BPM, whereas it should be the other way around.
I also invite your view points on this topic…
23-March-14
Business Process Management (BPM) program has to be tied up with processes touching end customers. KPIs for such program should be directly related to customer satisfactions those can be measured easily. In order to get the real benefit of a BPM program; Processes should be looked holistically and processes should embrace customer side processes as well.
One of the classic use case we implement for many of our customer as part of Supply Chain Automation is “Order To Cash (OTC)”. OTC potentially can takes care of the processes starting from customer placing an order (Order management), to Inventory management, Order fulfillment, Shipment and Payments from customer (Accounts Receivables process). An entire integrated process where an organization can monitor the entire business process which is automated end to end; and at the same time customer can also monitor the it’s order and shipment…
Hence, it is very crucial for an organization to pick up the key business processes affecting customer satisfactions to prioritize it’s BPM program.
Business Process Management (BPM) program has to be tied up with processes touching end customers. KPI for such program should be directly to customer satisfactions which can be maesured easily. In order to get the real benifit of a BPM program, Processes should be looked at wholisticly and processes should embrace customer side processes.
One of the classic use cases we implement for many of our customer as part of Supply Chain Automation is Order To Cash (OTC). OTC potentially can takes care of the processes starting from customer placing a order (Order management), Inventory management, Order fulfilment, Shipment and Payments from customer (Accounts .
touching to them. It is very crucial
i would say BPM would continue to be a game changer as there is always a room for improvement in every business process.
I totally agree Praveen. Thanks for your point of view
As Customer and customer satisfaction is a priority, BPM will also be a priority.
I certainly agree..BPM is the key to bringing a radical change and transform organizations. Some of the concepts like Product postponement, assemble / make to order, Economic Ordering Quantity (EOQ) ,JIT etc has ruled the industry for quite sometime..Software is just an enabler and will have to certainly depend on the business logic from BPM concepts..