As the economy recovers, education needs to continue regarding how business process management (BPM) could affect the running of businesses, says K2 VP of Africa and Middle East, Eugene van Rensburg.
He argues companies should know that the timeframe to get the first process live cannot be six or more months away, and this is something the industry needs to get right. “Customers accept they need process applications or a bigger BPM strategy, but this needs to be an asset in the business that you can measure,” he adds.
People see BPM as an expense to the business, like electricity, explains Van Rensburg, which is not what BPM should be. “BPM should enable your business to achieve and gain market share.”
According to Van Rensburg, customers should get clarification on how long a BPM implementation will take before they see return on investment. “They should also know how much time will be spent aligning the business to this new strategy, and what a BPM roadmap would look like over the next 12 to 24 months,” he points out.
Subsequently, the customer should take these questions and align it to the available budget to see how it adds up, he advises. “They should not need to change their platform and re-tool just to fit the software solution.”
After the global downturn, customers are making smaller deals to allow for a lower initial investment and once they see the value, they are comfortable to keep investing, says Van Rensburg. “The need has not changed.”
“In SA and Africa we do see a number of customers buying solutions and looking at process enablement in the business.” This does mean more workflow focus than pure BPM selling, he adds.
Focused approach
Technology is evolving daily as new tools, applications, and use cases are developed and adopted by enterprises and business users, notes Van Rensburg. As a result, a new breed of BPM platforms is emerging, leveraging these technologies and new paradigms.
SAP chief technology architect, Alvin Paules, says: “It is critical that customers implement BPM with a business focus. They should understand the business value of each process.” He says analysts are identifying the main focus as the improvement of BPM, with the only tool to do this being BPM itself.
Janelle Hill, research VP at Gartner, says: "As organisations continue to embrace BPM to improve business performance during challenging times, this quest is pushing BPM beyond its traditional focus on routine, predictable, sequential processes towards broader, cross-boundary processes that include more unstructured work.
Hill says knowledge work is especially complex and unstructured. “New BPM technologies will enable the management of unstructured and dynamic processes to deliver greater knowledge, worker productivity, and competitive advantage," she adds.
“The drive we see behind something like SharePoint 2010 and the hype around it, is going to change how customers experience BPM, says Van Rensburg. “The more users get used to portals and seeing how they are part of a process in the company, the more people will drive BPM and workflow. This more business and user-driven, and less IT driven,” he concludes.
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