Business Process Management [BPM]

Processes drive business agility, but most companies continue seeking out methods that can maximize productivity and leverage technology investments before they invest in effective ways to manage and optimize their business processes.

A business process is a set of linked steps or activities that taken together, result in a specific business outcome, either internal or external to the organization.

Documenting and automating business processes involve describing what is done, why it is done, how it is done, who (system or people) does it, as well as how well it is done. Organizations are increasingly flooded with information and informal processes based on people knowledge. These informal processes can often be very risky and expensive for companies, since employees take their knowledge and experience with them as they change jobs. However, efforts to formalize and manage informal business processes can be challenging, since processes extend across departments and IT systems running in multiple, disconnected sources.

Business Process Management [BPM] is the key to meeting these challenges and creating highly efficient and responsive business processes. BPM is a type of management discipline that integrates people, content and enterprise applications by combining a process-centric and cross-functional approach.
Business Process Management solutions provide the tools that help make business processes explicit while providing the functionalities to help business managers control and change both manual and automated workflows. BPM also offers the following benefits:

• Enhanced organizational agility efficiency;
• Supports the personnel efforts to drive process change and rapid innovation;
• Increases customer retention by providing customers better access to resources and information;
• Reduces cycle times through process optimization;
• Improves regulatory compliance, lowering the risk of errors with manual processes;
• Lowers Total Cost of Ownership by connecting users and applications within a unified business process management environment;
• Accelerates responsiveness to business or transaction events with repeatable and automated processes;
• Delivers immediate and impressive ROI.

A comprehensive Business Process Management solution supports all iterative stages of the BPM lifecycle by offering a number of innovative technologies that allow you to define, model, simulate, deploy, execute, monitor, analyze, and optimize your organization’s business processes toward the goal of improving agility and operational performance.

Today`s business environment demands that organizations redouble their efforts to improve the efficiency of processes that have a positive impact on financial performance.

Organizations looking to grow revenue and decrease costs are increasingly using Business Process Management (BPM) to reach their goals. According to Gartner, 80% of enterprises using BPM will experience an internal rate of return better than 15 per cent.

Increasingly, Business Process Management is seen as a bottom line enterprise application and studies have shown that the ROI on BPM projects has been fantastic, with clients reporting initial ROIs in the range of 100% to 300% and payback timeframes of 6 to 12 months. This is because successful BPM projects are not technology decisions, they are business decisions. Business buyers rave about the ROI and often report 10-times ROI than their counterparts that buy BPM like it was an operating system or some other mundane infrastructure technology.

ROI is typically thought of as the measure of cost reduction or profit increase directly attributed to the investment taken. Commonly, when enterprise professionals discuss the ROI of an investment, they are mostly thinking of "financial" benefits. Today, organizations must also consider the "non financial" benefits of an investment.

Financial Benefits include impacts on the organization`s budget and finances, e.g., cost reductions or revenue increases. This is one aspect of ROI.

Non Financial Benefits are the so-called "intangibles", "soft", or "unquantifiable" benefits of an investment. These benefits can represent real ROI and include effects on business operations and productivity that do not directly translate into increased positive cash flow. These "non financial" benefits are most often centered on business critical activities required to meet the customer, partner or regulatory requirements of doing business. In this case, ROI represents the sustaining of the company`s business rather than increased profit or reduced costs.

SoftExpert BPM Suite produces positive impacts on five primary categories: Automation, Qual¬ity, Compliance, Management and Optimization (cost reduction / performance improvement). These include improved customer satisfaction, enhanced organizational agility, better access to resources and information, and shorter cycle-time.

The benefits calculation for BPM can be both direct, like reduction of workloads for existing staff, and indirect, like productivity or improved quality. Both should be measured for BPM business case efforts.

In conclusion, the majority of projects that have deployed SoftExpert BPM Suite have been successful. There are many reasons for this. The solution offers substantive ROI benefits to three essential communities: the IT/Developer community; the business stakeholder; and the end user. If you combine the ROI effects for these three communities, you can easily get improvement ranging from low double digit benefits (10% and more) to well into the triple digits. This, of course depends on the project and type of application or deployment. But the key message remains that BPM ROI is real and can substantially improve the productivity of IT, the performance visibility as well as performance control for the business owners, and the efficiency of the end user through streamlining tasks and reducing potential errors.

SoftExpert Business Process Management (BPM) Suite provides the following benefits:
Financial ROI:

• Reduces the number of FTEs (full-time employees) needed to perform non-value-added functions within the organization.
• Cuts the costs of having overtime work by automating and optimizing manual tasks, thereby directly reducing outbound cash flow.
• Reduces the time spent in satisfying a customer inquiry by continuously improving and monitoring customer service processes.
• Eliminates revenue losses due to the enforcement of rules and processes relative to strategic planning mandates.
• Avoids costs of audit fees by providing means to quickly create processes to track compliance efforts.
• Produces lower costs and higher revenues by:
  • Performing faster complete times and shorter processing cycle times.
  • Saving costs from higher productivity and throughput.
  • Reallocating valuable human resources.
  • Creating competitive advantage from market capitalization.
  • Improving responsiveness to market opportunities.
  • Reducing administration time and hand-offs.
  • Eliminating manual errors.
  • Creating more efficient data entry environment.
  • Reducing support costs.
  • Improving ad hoc reporting.

Investment

• Investment in SoftExpert BPM will depend upon the business unit size and implementation approach.

Return on Investment (%)

• ((((Total Annual Savings) x n years) - Initial Investment) / Initial Investment) x 100.

Payback Period (years)

• Initial Investment / Total Annual Savings.

 
Non Financial ROI:

• Produces motivated employees, and happier customers.
• Improves business agility and readiness by increasing process efficiency.
• Ensures optimum resource utilizations due to process standardization.
• Improves process control, process optimization and rapid change.
• Promotes collaboration between IT and business users to document and implement the process.
• Manages the changes to organizations in terms of roles, structure and activities.
• Integrates with existing applications in a meaningful way.
• Monitors the performance of individual processes or aggregates and potentially identifies trends.
• Dynamically changes the business rules that drive your processes, to achieve your performance goals.
• Increases productivity due to process automation.
• Reduces the time needed to adjust process to changes on the market.
• Provides managers with exception handling capabilities.
• Reduces the number of tasks done manually and automatically decreases the number of resources needed.
• Saves time by centrally managing all business processes.
• Increases customer retention rate, reputation, market share and revenue by improving customer satisfaction.
• Provides integration of compliance management capabilities into current business processes to support regulatory compliance.

Remember! ROI is never calculated in a vacuum. The ROI you project for your BPM initiative will probably be different the ROI you ultimately achieve, because there are so many factors-employee turnover, new competitors` initiatives, vendor changes-that can impact the ROI of your project. In this case, keep in mind that ROI is not always measurable in dollars and cents!

SoftExpert BPM is a comprehensive suite of seamlessly integrated modules and components designed to manage the entire Business Process Management [BPM] lifecycle and support the needs of all BPM stakeholders in the company, including management, work teams, IT teams and business analysts. The solution also provides a fully integrated Enterprise Content Management Suite that allows businesses to realize the strategic benefits of a common application platform while streamlining everyday business activities, connecting and sharing knowledge throughout the organization. The main outcome is a BPM Suite that delivers greater agility, ensures faster ROI and lower TCO than the competitive solutions.

SoftExpert BPM Suite offers you an easily deployable and fully web-based solution for automating human-centric and document-centric business processes. The solution involves your company’s personnel, applications and information with your business processes by integrating all the necessary process components, such as information systems (e.g. ERP, CRM, HR), documents, external databases, etc., into a single automated environment.

The following are some of the main components and features of the SoftExpert BPM Suite:

Process Discovery – Supports end-to-end process discovery by capturing essential process data, such as inputs/outputs, resources, costs, time and specific calendars. Business analysts and non-technical users are provided with an easy-to-use (drag and drop) process design tool.

Content Services – Fully integrated Enterprise Content Management [ECM] Suite to manage, store and deliver process-related documents (e.g. procedures, training videos, presentations, templates, etc.) without requiring third party tools or custom programming.

Process Modeling – Powerful graphic modeling tool that empowers business-level users to write, manage and modify rules to better match business needs.

Risk Management – Complete risk assessment tool mitigates or neutralizes potential risks based on designed business processes.

Performance Management – Links indicators and targets to processes through the use of an integrated Corporate Performance Management [CPM] tool.

Process Simulator – Fully integrated simulation designer allows business users to set attributes into “what-if” scenarios, such as activity duration, costs, resource utilization, executors and cycle times, among other variables. The simulator also offers a powerful animation, allowing for up-to-the-second analyses of process performance.

Process Delivery Services – Web-based deployment that makes business process knowledge permanently accessible to users. This enterprise process repository guarantees simple navigation through multiple levels of a process hierarchy.

Process Engine – Executes and controls business processes running in a production environment, assigning process tasks to the correct team, role, or individual at the appropriate time.

Task Management – Full task management that ensures ownership, delegation of tasks and automatic escalation, while enforcing the task priorities and deadlines required to meet Service Level Agreements.

Process Connectors – Provides seamless integration of business processes with best-of-breed, third-party applications such as ERP, portals, reporting tools and other IT applications.

Business Activity Monitoring – Allows process managers to configure critical event alerts for any user or role and provides real-time dashboards for a quick overview of work load and current situation.

Business Intelligence – Delivers line-of-business reporting and helps business users identify process bottlenecks. BI capabilities provide managers with the ability to drill down on data and “slice and dice” from different perspectives, based on Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) technology.

SE BPM Suite empowers people to effectively manage departmental, enterprise and inter-enterprise business processes. It supports all elements of the business process lifecycle - from discovery and definition, to modeling, simulation, deployment, execution, monitoring and analysis to continuous process improvement.

The concepts and features offered by SoftExpert for Business Process Management meet all the requirements established by international standards and regulations, such as ISO 9000, ISO 14000, OHSAS 18000, ISO/TS 16949, BPMM, Six Sigma, FDA 21 CFR Part 11, FDA 21 CFR Part 820, SOX, ISO 22000 [HACCP], ISO 20000 [ITIL], COBIT, BSC and others.