The current worldwide economic crisis has put business process management (BPM) on the executive's agenda for facilitating growth while reducing costs, according to Cathy Kohler, business analyst at Intervate.
“The recession is really BPM nirvana out there,” said Kohler during her keynote address, 'Getting started with business process management', at Intervate's second annual conference, held in Sandton last week.
Kohler argued that organisations could use this opportunity to re-evaluate and streamline their current business practice. “In the current market conditions you have to be agile in your business processes. One market influences the other and you always have to be ready to adjust to the market change.”
Referring to a recent Gartner report on the BPM industry, Kohler highlighted some of the market trends. According to the report, improving business process is a number one priority for CIOs. Reducing cost has moved to second place. She explained that the findings were aligned with the current market trend to improve productivity as well as cutting costs.
Kohler advised that, according to the Gartner report, organisations should “avoid hunting 'cool and sexy' BPM projects, and instead go back to basics”. She argued that the fundamentals of BPM are simply a set of linked steps of activities with a business goal.
In order to return to the basics, Kohler suggested the following project steps: define the business process goals, use model process diagrams, deploy an optimised execution process, and provide real-time feedback to management.
She explained that BPM is a continuous improvement cycle and warned that automating a bad BPM project will only lead to a faster bad process.
Kohler's key advice for organisations includes over-planning BPM projects, defining strategy, and ensuring a continuously improving implementation.
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