South Africa is now a mature business process management (BPM) market; however, the real challenge is to ensure that BPM is not exclusively viewed as a technology solution.
This is according to Tim Stanley, Global 360 regional sales director for Africa and the Middle East, who says there is a growing awareness in SA of the value that BPM brings to business.
ITWeb, in partnership Global 360, is running the BPM 2011 Survey to determine the state of South African organisations' business processes.
The survey also aims to find out the major drivers causing organisations to focus on business process change as well as the obstacles being faced in BPM initiatives.
The results of the survey, together with the winner of the prize draw, will be published on ITWeb.
Those who complete the survey stand a chance to win an iPad 2.
BPM confusion
Stanley says BPM in SA is not underrated, but rather misunderstood. “There is a confused message in the market with many ERP [enterprise resource planning] or financial applications and some workflow or document management solutions claiming to offer enterprise BPM.
Stanley points out that BPM is evolving as both a management discipline and as a technology solution.
“As a management discipline, we are seeing improved methodologies that incorporate concepts such as Lean and Six Sigma to provide a sustainable framework on how a business builds measures and looks to constantly improve business process.”
He explains that many consulting firms are now providing exclusive practices that focus on this value proposition to help business develop a process strategy that aligns with their overall business objectives.
From a technology perspective, he says, the IT industry is seeing development configuration-based solutions that offer rapid deployment. “This is coupled with a far more intuitive end-user experience that brings easy-to-use solutions to each of the participants in a process.”
Joint management
He adds that a BPM project or strategy requires a high-level of involvement from the process business owners to make it successful.
“Research has shown that the most common cause of failure in BPM projects is where the ownership of the project is placed exclusively in the hands of IT,” he notes.
“One of the major differences in the implementation of a BPM project is that the business gets the opportunity to communicate with the IT team in a non-technical manner about their process automation requirements, and this can be implemented into an execution system relatively quickly.”
Stanley advises companies to consider establishing an internal centre of excellence to ensure that both the business discipline and technology implementation are jointly managed.
He says: “Gartner has recently evaluated that when a BPM solution is implemented correctly, and a centre of excellence is established as part of the strategy, efficiencies of around 40% to 50% are normally achieved.
“In addition to this benefit, operational costs are reduced by an average of 30%, customer experience improves and real-time visibility increases; which has a direct impact on risk management and compliance.”
According to Stanley, the alignment of a company's business strategy and objectives combined with an enterprise process strategy provides huge strategic value in improving customer service and managing risk and compliance.
“At the end of the day, the customer is the winner as the objective of most BPM-related strategies is ultimately to focus on providing a better customer experience at a more competitive price.
“If one were to look at the application of this in our public sector, BPM could have a massive impact on our service delivery and the knock-on effect to our overall economy would be incredibly significant.”
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