The Business Case for BPM

Where to start?

Our recommendation is always to focus the first year of BPM delivery into the Polyfiller and Excel on Steroids type of deployments. They suit iterative methods, require quick wins, have business visibility and ownership and make a difference in the current fiscal year. The bottom line is that if they go wrong they are not job loss/annual report write down issues! From the lessons learnt in these initial deployments larger “Building the Future” projects that deliver significant benefits can be shaped for delivery in a subsequent phase.

Business Case for BPM

Many BPM initiatives fail to deliver in the timescale and cost parameters envisaged at the start of the project. Usually this is because the business takes an application perspective or tries to address too complex a problem in the first few iterations. In analyzing the start point for BPM deployment we categorise the inventory of projects whilst building a hypothetical return on investment for each one which helps focus prioritization. We think of the following types of project:

Excel on Steroids

The performance of a departmental function in a process is often held in a dashboard or pivot table that is contributed to by a number of users. Or due to the lack of systems to manage a work item a spreadsheet is created to govern the terms of a process or contract.

Inch Wide Mile Deep

Data and Decision Centric Event Management that involves complex process activities that also do the work of highly skilled operators. Typical applications are dependant on real time data feeds, and provide exception management or complex case processing.

Polyfiller

The deployment of BPM to provide process support that fills in all the application gaps in the ERP & CRM landscape of a business. This variant will grow significantly in the mash up-driven Web 2.0 marketplace we are about to enter. For a large number of BPM projects this is often the start point where a quick Return on Investment can be easily achieved.

Building the Future

The development of a set of core applications that create sustainable competitive differentiation and advantage, regardless of customer, channel, product, service, geography, language or transaction.