Jim SinurMany of our clients are asking where to start with BPM. Strategically, we advise to work on a large scoped end to end process that is important to your organization after a try with something smaller in scope to build confidence, but the economic reality for those organizations that are trying to ride out the economic storm is different. I’d like to suggest some good starting points
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Leveraging Process Discovery:
Organizations can deliver some quick hit benefits by either modeling or measuring existing processes. Quite often business folks can find ways to stream line processes by examining them. It could be a facilitated session to agree on what the process should be and make changes from there. This is a quick hit technique. Quite often, folks discover unnecessary and/or better shadow processes while doing a quick process discovery effort.
Focusing on Pay-outs:
Cash is king today and any process that involves pay-outs is a great place to start: This has the double win of identifying pay-outs that are not legitimate and you can control the speed of payout by dialing the rules to a proper level for conditions. The flexibility added here can be used in other kinds of business scenarios, such as inflation.
Focusing on Reconciliation:
Managing suspense accounts and cross organizational reconciliation are huge synchronization issues that just drain time and money. Any effort to make these cleaner and easier would help the bottom line. The replacement of processes with a good set of rules here would also be a help. There has to be a threshold of effort that makes sense for the amount involved. Some of this could be out-tasked as well.
Focusing on Risks:
Taking on new clients, partners, employees are always important things to do right. Working on processes that are efficient and effective at managing risk is a natural for BPM. Proper risk underwriting was at the heart of the start of our economic spin down exhibiting itself in the last three quarters.
Process Standardization:
There are many opportunities in medium to large size organizations to eliminate redundant processes and create standard processes that have more local variations in the rules that guide them
These are my top five BPM starting points, but be careful not to sub-optimize now and pay later.
See http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/06/end-to-end-processes-that-fit-you-to-a-t/ How about you?
Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Tags: BPM, Business Process Improvement, Business Rules
2 responses so far ↓
1 Bernard Debauche April 17, 2009 at 5:05 pm
“Why would a process solve my business problem?” Overcoming this question can also represent an important BPM starting point. Convincing key executives that a process approach is appropriate for tackling business issues depends on how one answers this question. Some clever folks at a large European telecom company did just that. They identified for their board a direct link between customer issues (late deliveries, bad-quality post-sales service, etc.) and company-process dysfunctions. (Sometimes, the absence of an end-to-end process explicitly illustrates the ruptures in the delivery chain and the causes of these customer problems.) As customer satisfaction is the driver for business development, the board recognized that BPM was an appropriate means to solving these business issues.
Bernard Debauche
VP EMEA Marketing
Axway
2 Choose Your Process Discovery Method: Model or Measure May 26, 2009 at 7:44 pm
[...] This is not a zero-sum situation. One can use both, but it is rare to start out with both approaches. One eventually leverages both. Keep in mind that process discovery is only one of many places to start a BPM effort (see http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/14/the-top-five-bpm-starting-points-today/). [...]