BPM is a philosophy; it's not a single-step solution but rather an ongoing journey, says John Hayden, MD of John Hayden and Associates, a business consulting firm.
“To reengineer and automate a major core process is a difficult journey and it's not a six-month journey but more realistically an eight-month to three-year journey.”
Hayden will speak at the Business Process Management (BPM) Summit and Excellence Awards. The event is organised and run by ITWeb in conjunction with the BPTGroup, and will be held from 25 to 27 August at Montecasino.
The BPM Excellence Awards are designed to celebrate achievements leading the way in BPM implementation in SA. Hayden is one of the judges for the awards.
Integrating management
Hayden says: “Most companies are organisationally structured into departments and each department has a particular function to perform, and that's generally a good thing to do in managing your company.
“The challenge is that we manage our companies in vertical silos and work has to happen crossing from one department to another. There is no focus in managing the end-to-end processes as each department only owns a piece of it. They are not pulling together as one and the company suffers because of this.”
Under pressure
According to Hayden, competitive business pressures and increasing demands from customers for better quality of service are forcing companies to continually improve their services.
“It's easy to talk about work committed to customer excellence but most companies struggle to achieve significant successes in reengineering and improving processes. This is because the software tools are expensive and implementation is a hard journey and IT skills and experience in SA is thin.”
He notes that BPM projects can be risky, because often the technology doesn't do what vendors promise. In addition, BPM implementation can end up being more complex, expensive and time-consuming.
Hayden points out that despite the challenges surrounding BPM, deploying an effective BPM strategy can lead to real business efficiency.
“People resist change and don't put enough effort into managing changes; businesses need to map out and analyse processes rigorously.”
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