WHITE PAPER | BPM DONE RIGHT
Itroductio
Rates o adoption o Business ProcessManagement (BPM) technology areincreasing dramatically, and with them,the stories o missed expectations, wastedinvestment and outright ailure are alsoon the rise.Have you ever been so excited by a newpiece o technology - a computer, phoneor iPod - that you ripped open thepackaging and started playing withoutreading the instructions? You probably hadun playing, but it took longer than itshould have to nd the right ways o mak-ing things work.In act, you probably still aren’t usingsome technologies the way you shouldand you may have given up altogetherand written o the investment.BPM includes some cool eatures withtempting promises o ease-o-use, happier,more productive workers and ast returns.As a result, it is tempting to just plowahead and get the technology installedwithout thinking about the less interestingelements such as methodology, new rolesand responsibilities, training and the like.BPM’s promises are real, but the path tosuccess is littered with pitalls andshortcuts to ailure. Best practices can helpyou avoid them. The good news is thatBPM has now reached a stage o maturitywhich ensures that customers who are just embarking on using its methods andtools have a wealth o experience to learnrom and build on. To succeed with BPM,you will need to develop your own bestpractices and constantly evolve them tostay ahead o the competition. Theollowing “lessons-learned” provide agood place to start.Oten your processes are working welland the benet rom BPM comes romincreased levels o automation and agility.But don’t embark on BPM assuming thiswill always be the case. I a process isbroken, then automating it will onlygenerate errors aster. Ensure that youhave relevant data on the eectiveness oprocesses beore you automate theirexecution. Measure rst!Most people won’t admit it, but the vastmajority o business decisions are basedon gut eel, intuition and experience. “Wethink the process works like this, so weshould do X?” Or “Customer orders weredelayed in the past primarily because o Y,so go x that!” This may have worked inthe past, but in a ast-changing andunpredictable business environment, guteel and experience won’t cut it. Theemphasis has to be on real-time, end-to-end monitoring against the things thatmatter to your business – Key Peror-mance Indicators (KPIs). You’ll besurprised how productive project meetingsbecome when you start to have conversa-tions based on relevant, actionable data!However, measuring during the project isonly part o the story. I you are exploringwhere to start with BPM, Business ActivityMonitoring (BAM) can provide the answer.Would you go to a doctor and receive adiagnosis i he hadn’t done a thorough‘root cause analysis’ based on your currentsymptoms? I there is only one thing youshould remember here, it is this: Start yourBPM project by measuring your currentperormance. Without an accurate currentdiagnosis your project will be unocused;your ROI will be lower, and your eortsmay end up being targeted at the wrongproblem. I a vendor tells you to modelyour critical processes beore you cananalyze and improve them – be wary! Itprobably means they simply have a reallynice modeling tool.Measuring rst always uncovers thingsyou didn’t know about your business,purely because until you are able to lookinside the key metrics o a process mosto your decisions will be made on theprocess outputs - and that is only hal thestory. I you are ullling 100 percent oyour orders on time, but to do that youhave to expedite those orders bythrowing more and more people at theprocess, then you’re probably notachieving your core business goals. Yourmargins will be lower, but you won’tknow why.Finally, or all the talk o continuousimprovement, BPM still involves projects,and projects have xed durations. YourBPM project must have an end point. Sure,the project itsel may be very short andthe improvement incremental, but unlessyou can complete a cycle and measureand celebrate your success (or evaluateyour ailure) at the end, then you’ll be in aconstant state o change with no realsense o progress.
Do‘t Automak or th Sak o It!“A ma who cotiually shootshimsl i th oot should ot buya automatic wapo!”
- Chinese proverb
Masur First, Masur Ot adMasur Last“Th ral troubls i your li arapt to b thigs that vr crossdyour worrid mid; th kid thatblidsid you at 4 PM o som idlTusday.”
- Baz Luhrman
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