Understanding the Potential for BPM ROI

Understanding how Business Process Management (BPM) can deliver value to business is becoming increasingly well understood by businesses and IT.   The following points, however, provide insight as to why there may be slow adoption across some organisations:

• Presence of pockets of user resistance across organisations and departments
• Inadequate understanding leading to poor adoption due to immaturity
• Lack of executive sponsorship
• Absence of a strategic plan to adopt BPM i.e. adoption tends to be tactical (departmental)

Business users, practitioners and technologists all differ in their opinion of what BPM is and what is hype, theory and practically achievable, but there does seem to be a consensus that it has the capability for sizeable and  realizable benefits when implemented correctly.

Research from analysts and practical experience from BPM implementations have shown that moving from theory to practice is a big challenge for most organisations and I would argue that it is purely due to not being able to gain a clear assessment on the ROI. BPM Return on Investment (ROI) can be broadly categorised in the following ways:

• Automation – In a nutshell, automation is the conversion of process actions from a current operation that requires manual human intervention to a new operation that is performed in an automated manner.
• Quality – Processes typically require the collection of data in a specific form and validates that actions were taken, in the appropriate manner by the appropriate personnel. Quality processes can also include the collection of measured data (audit log and performance metrics) to support proof of quality for the product/output produced.
• Compliance – Common characteristics of compliance include adherence to a known set of operational policies and procedures, recording substantiating evidence that such compliance occurred, auditable trails for all compliance requirements and auditable records of change to the process or operations that could have a potential effect on adherence to compliance requirements. Because BPM is specifically designed to model and manage all business processes, it is ideal for achieving compliance for virtually any regulatory or partner requirement.
• Management & Performance Monitoring – BPM is an excellent tool for improving the management of a business. The primary functionality available to aid managers includes alerts and escalations based on Business Rules, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and managerial process views. Management ROI is driven by real-time reaction to disruptions and proactive addressing of potential disruptions or adjustments to personnel activities to meet current business/customer requirements.
• Optimisation – Performing process analysis for identifying potential cost reductions and ‘tuning’ the enterprise towards optimal performance requires that the metrics these process activities are based on be defined during the process modelling stage. This step is essential to successful analysis and improvement of a given process or a collection of processes.

BPM is very ‘real’ and has great potential for benefits realisation. Organisations that have taken the leap of faith have proven this and for the majority that have kept up the momentum and focused on finding additional opportunities in their organisations, have gone on to gain incremental value from the adoption of a BPMS and BPM.

In an economic climate where there is continual scrutiny of operational and discretionary budgets and compliance and regulatory demands, any opportunity for demonstrating cost reductions, good governance and efficiency gains should be treated as a priority.