Craig Leppan, Ovations

Many companies are turning to BPM in this time of financial pressure

Instead of product or service innovation, smart leaders are turning to process innovation, otherwise known as business process management (BPM), to find new efficiencies and boost all-important margins in the quest for growth. This is according to a recent IDG Connect study, sponsored by Capgemini, in which 68% of respondents said if the recession continued, it would persuade them to invest even more heavily in BPM.

Says Premie Naicker, COO of AIGS: “Prior to implementing a BPM solution, organisations have the opportunity to re-engineer their process, thereby eliminating waste, which then leads to cost savings and efficiency gains. BPM gives companies the opportunity to optimise their resources from a staffing perspective, and to put staff into revenue-generating opportunities rather than manual, mundane tasks.”

The survey also noted that three-quarters of companies (74%) said process management boosts staff satisfaction by helping to reduce task duplication and improve the internal organisation. IDG says productivity has a dual benefit – higher productivity is good for the bottom-line and also good for employee engagement. “In this way, BPM becomes self-fulfilling: businesses that concentrate on process improvement are usually also full of happy employees, who in turn are more likely to work even harder.”

“Gartner and Forrester even recommend that BPM, BRM and BI are required as complementary technologies to support the line-of-business systems in an SOA environment,” Naicker adds.

According to Craig Leppan, associate director at Ovations, one is wise to not only think about the spend side of BPM, but doing more with less. “It’s about higher volumes with the same headcount, more sales or operations, being able to service more customers, or just understanding what your core value processes are that earn you revenue,” he says. “Once you can improve those, and scale them up with the same cost, your business case for doing what you do, only better, should speak for itself.”

The pace of the modern marketplace, says Naicker, has resulted in a drive towards business agility at a lower cost, as enterprises have to adapt quickly to changes in their operating environment. “This, in turn, has led to an increase in demand for SOA and cloud solutions,” she says. “In addition, the advent of cloud BPM has made BPM technologies accessible to small businesses, which previously were cost prohibitive. Case management technologies have made it possible to share documentation across departments and to empower knowledge workers – coupled with BPM, this provides process flow functionality and collaboration, as BPM not only defines a process, but maintains it over time.”

According to Leppan, technologies like mobile access from iPads and iPhones, improved security outside the corporate firewall, more consistent adoption of standards like BPMN (for modelling) by BPM system vendors, higher value and performance from hardware all affect BPM and its ability to deliver process-oriented systems to process mature organisations. “However,” he continues, “ubiquitous access to e-mail – thanks to the mobile and security advancements, powerful and standardised spreadsheet systems across platforms – also allow undisciplined organisations to work around the standard systems that are put in place to encourage governance and process maturity.”

BPM faces positives and negatives from improved technology, and to quote a much-clichéd sentiment, he says, BPM is not about technology.

Naicker believes process intensive departments would benefi t by deploying BPM by eliminating manual data entry as well as manual routing and associated human errors, which reduces process cycle time. “Processes also handle exceptions faster and better, as well as assist organisations in making better decisions,” she says.

“Traditionally, BPM has been applied to the back-office, where high volume processing is occurring and the cost of this process – failing or exceeding SLAs – is then costly to the business or damages client relationships,” Leppan explains.

“BPM is now applied to the front-end of sales and call centres, for example, in order to drive up customer experience, but there is no one good answer to what area will benefit most from BPM. It’s up to each business to look at themselves and assess where the financial, operational or reputational benefit will come from, with greater process maturity and getting things right the first time.”

According to Naicker, BPM has created the opportunity for customer self-service, because it automates business rules. “In short,” she continues, “customers can go online and apply for loans, log insurance claims or make use of other services through an automated process. This means that clients are no longer confined to the bricks-and-mortar scenario, where they would have to wait for office hours to transact or dial into a call centre.”

She explains the turnaround response time is also much faster, because it is not dependent on human beings physically processing the information. “To provide a simple example, if the processes are designed correctly, it would be possible for a client to log in and register a short-term insurance claim online that can either trigger assessments or even finalise settlements for fast-track claims, without any intervention from a consultant.”

Leppan says BPM is all about consistent process, and that applies to the customer first, hopefully. “BPM is also about process improvement, so hopefully your experience actually improves as you deal with an organisation, and they respond to you and others and learn what they can do better. However, generally this won’t happen until the business has a way to measure that customer experience or process, and also has the means to apply improvements that drive a better way of doing things.”

Unfortunately, he continues, many businesses still rely on great people to learn, be trained and respond based on their ever-increasing knowledge of the internal or line of business systems, in order to deliver a great customer service experience. “BPM can help large organisations which face low barriers to entry in the customer service business and need to put in place mature processes and systems that guide staff to assist customers to service resolution from whatever channel they choose to engage on. One of the great challenges is to allow for process engagement to start on a chosen channel (eg, e-mail, mobile, Internet) and resume or be fulfilled on others (branch, call centre, etc).”