Take Small BPM Steps For Some Big Leaps

At a time when the IT investment decisions are reportedly moving along with a sense of restrain, some projects and investments seem to be getting delayed or put on hold.
This situation marked by lower budgets and slower decision cycles has not only caused discomfort to IT vendors, but also CIOs, IT managers, and  even business managers looking to have  important, semi-critical  projects take off.The biggest casualty to you may be the value benefits you had expected from those IT project investments originally planned.

Irrespective of the nature, type or scope of the project, your value benefits – be it automation, operational, tactical, strategic – are an organizational opportunity. Any delay in realizing that opportunity is opportunity cost.

And opportunity cost is opportunity lost. Right?

Perhaps, but breathe easy. All is not lost. Even if that big project will not take off this quarter, you could still help your organization to some value benefit by other means because, there may still be several small, but significant opportunities strewn and hidden across different functions that are waiting to be spotted, waiting to be tapped.

Business Process Management (BPM) tools can help you unlock some level of opportunity that may still be hidden. If your organization has already invested in licenses on BPM products and has some level of SOA thinking going on already, you could be closer to realizing those opportunities.

But spotting such opportunities is easier if you wear a new thinking hat – one that helps you break away from conventional application silo thinking. 

Are you thinking in Application Silos?

Analysts, thought leaders and tech writers have all talked about the silos that have evolved over years – and these silos have been influenced by the road-maps of packaged applications addressing ERP, CRM and so on. While one cannot accuse ERP and CRM vendors for fanning these silos, what is more significant to note is that our own thinking has become siloed. We tend to compartmentalize processes addressed by the ERP or CRM as an ERP process or a CRM process and this is really what can further exacerbate the silos. Because by slotting organizational processes under different Packaged Application in use, you confront the risk of overlooking the importance of many processes that overlap more than one application, different functions, different departments, or even different teams.

Take for example, an Order-to-Cash process – this is a classic cross-functional process that cuts across Sales, Production and Finance. This means your CRM, ERP and Finance applications will handle transactions at different parts of the process. And so if you want to introduce an Online Ordering mechanism to customers, you would make it in the CRM, if you want to add a manual quality inspection step you would do it in your ERP. If you want an additional level of payment approval, you would do it in the Financial Application.

In many situations, this may address the fundamental operational need driving a change, but does little to improve or exercise better control of the overall order-to-cash process itself, because parts of the process are locked in three different applications.

A whole set of unrealized costs, hidden efficiencies, and unsaved time can be discovered when you can break free of this thinking and de-couple the process from these applications, and yet exploit the transactional competence of these applications.

This fundamental change in thinking can be crucial in spotting silos and gaps and in viewing the latent potential of improving cross-functional, multi-application dependent process efficiencies and BPM can effectively help in tapping this gap.
Several such processes that depend on multiple functions sometimes become orphans, because they are never owned, driven or controlled by any single Packaged Application. Some of these Orphan Processes may be manually executed and can significantly drain effort, cost or efficiency, and even drag overall effectiveness of one or more functions. At best, even if your orphan process is not dragging overall efficiency, it may be operating sub-optimally, still giving you the possibility of achieving a higher level of efficiency.

Spot the ‘Orphan’
Spotting such processes can be easy if you are able to characterize an Orphan Process in the context of your organization. Typically the Orphan Process once spotted and automated using a BPM tool can give significant value benefits.

At the same time, many regular processes also may have the latency to produce equally significant value benefits.

Processes – both orphan and regular - with such potential have some key attributes that can be identified by asking the following questions

> Do process participants have to access multiple Packaged Applications to execute the process?
> Does it have periodic IT change requests that are a constant challenge to fulfill?
Are expectations of customers not being met higher in one function than in other?
> Does the process repeatedly demand manual human intervention when there are deviations or exceptions?
> Does the process or a set of activities in the process need to comply with regulatory directives in terms of timelines, information or responses?
> Do you find it challenging to execute the process consistently? Do you have manually driven process best practice that you find challenging to operationalize?
> Is there visibility into the process? Is it a challenge to make available process metrics such as average execution time, number of process deviations and other process activity monitoring metrics?

Based on your organizational priorities, you could craft more pointed questions that will expose the processes that hold an opportunity. With a list of process that offer the potential of improvement opportunity, the small steps begin.

Taking Those Steps

BPM initiatives where such gaps are bridged and higher efficiency is unlocked do not have to be mammoth projects spanning multiple years backed by heavy budgets. This approach focuses on smaller wins, significant, more immediate benefits and quicker turn-around-times that make the organization more effective in the long run. Not to mention the opportunity of competitive advantage.

So, while you wait for the investment tempo on a more large-scale enterprise level project (including even an organization wide BPM implementation) to kick in, it may be a good time to shift some attention to finding pockets of latent opportunity, though scattered, in your organization that may be waiting to be tapped

BPM

Business Process Management process optimization; composite applications;