Jim Sinur

If you are a CFO, that title just made you spit up on your desk. Trees and people; who cares? It’s all about the money honey. “Go and hug a tree, Jim”. The good news is that these things are not mutually exclusive goals even at today’s commodity price points that are being held down by a “crab walking” economy. You can leverage people resources better without treating them badly and giving them poor service. You can move towards sustainability and make money while being transparent in our decisions and actions while keeping up with the pace of change. One could call this “blue sky” thinking, but the proof points are there in organizational case studies. Let’s explore each facet of these three congruent goals.

People are just so crucial in our processes. It is important to treat our clients well and give them a process that does not frustrate them and maybe even delights them. If does not cost much to do it right. Leveraging the your collective client base through inexpensive collaborative set of methods, ahead of time, is cheaper than surveying them to tell you what you want to hear by designing “CYA” (cover your backside) questions. Start creating surveys with real customer feedback. Enabling your employees, partners and vendors while driving the work to the lowest level of skill where ever possible is the way to make more money Super-charging support for all skill levels enables each level to reach to higher skill levels at a lower salary cost just makes sense. The highest cost to a company is the loss of a customer, then an employee and finally a partner. Do you want to risk that with poor processes?

The Planet is more important now than ever now that we know it’s not inexhaustible. Thinking about sustainability should be on our minds “24*7”. If not just because I have eight grandchildren, so far, it makes economic sense. Why would you knowingly “push up” the costs of your future resources by gobbling them up now? Sustainability means meeting the needs of the present without compromising future the generation’s ability to meet their needs. We need to leverage BPM to optimize the use of scarce resources. We need BPM to help regions, countries and organizations to extend their sustainability over a long period of time. There are certainly untold opportunities to save paper by leveraging electronic content “Just reducing worldwide paper usage by 10% would save over 100,000,000 trees, 100,000,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and a staggering $3.5 billion in paper costs. BPM can be at the heart of optimizing resources, if applied properly. I have dozens of case studies..

Profit is the fuel that drives BPM. When I first started surveying the ROI of BPM efforts, it scared me. The numbers were great, so I predicted about 15% ROI for most everybody. The truth of the matter is that the numbers were north of 20% consistently. I saw wild numbers of 220% and 360% that I had to throw out because they would have skewed the average.  I am still waiting for a BPM project on the rocks as it is bound to happen, but the majority of BPM efforts are delivering today.

People, Planet and Profit in the corner pocket !!!!!.