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Today's economic reality is one of increased competition, informed and demanding customers, commoditization of products and services, and relentless pressure to cut costs. Companies are again being asked to do more with less. Implementing Business Process Management (BPM) technology offers significant opportunity for automation and efficiency gains and return-on-investment across a wide range of business needs and functions, including accounts payable, procurement, human resources, order management and more.
This white paper examines some of the business benefits and potential cost savings that can accrue to an organization that implements a BPM solution. It also provides a brief introduction to LANDesk Process Manager software from LANDesk, designed to help your organization improve business efficiency and effectiveness by automating processes for a relatively inexpensive investment.
Introduction: The Process is the Basic Unit of Business Value
According to business process analysis and design expert, Dr. Laury Verner, businesses and governments over the past decade have devoted increasing attention to business processes-to their description, automation, and management. This interest, says Verner, grows out of the need to streamline business operations, consolidate organizations, and reduce costs, reflecting the fact that the process is the basic unit of business value within an organization.
The design and automation of business processes warrants its own field of study, known as business process management (BPM). BPM has emerged as a critical cross-discipline control and process enabler, and is responsible for ensuring consistency in planning and performance management while reducing costs across the enterprise.
BPM is the management of explicit business processes, like the ones needed to transfer an employee from one department to another or deliver a sales order. By definition, a business process is any sequence of structured or semi-structured tasks performed in series or in parallel by two or more individuals to reach a common goal. BPM software covers a whole range of capabilities, from simple administrative and task support to collaborative software and integration brokers that control system-to-system interaction. Pure-play BPM software has a runtime execution engine based on events.
BPM is thriving in many areas, including insurance, credit, banking and finance, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and telecommunications. Any company that is affected by compliance or productivity improvement programs like Six Sigma is a good candidate for enhanced BPM. The appeal is so broad that nearly every industry should embrace the principles of BPM, with the possible exception of low-margin industries where potential savings are limited.
In addition, BPM systems will need to represent business processes in the computer system so they can be directly manipulated by business analysts - not programmers or development staff. Making it easier for non-IT professionals to manage their business processes without intervention from IT naturally makes some IT professionals nervous. You have to be certain in an auditable process that your transaction has integrity. BPM systems vendors must scale this integrity while maintaining reliability in business processes designed, deployed and managed from the desktop.
Sound ambitious? Yes, but this is indeed the new possibility in business automation, a possibility that directly affects the bottom line and competitive advantage in today's complex, global economy. Where there is new possibility, there is new skepticism. What business analysts need are tools that allow easy development-a "flowchart on steroids" that models the business flow, documents the business flow, and is the execution engine all at the same time.
Reduced labor costs
The optimal processes to focus on are those that are repetitive and take a significant amount of labor. Any reduction in labor equates to an immediate cost savings. We look at what we are doing today and whether there is a faster, better way to do it. For example, by automating a task that requires five hours of manual intervention, we can expect to cut that time in half. Thus the 2.5 hours, multiplied by the number of times the process is completed in a cycle, will yield a significant cost savings.
Increased productivity
In an environment where we're all asked to do more with less, the best method to achieve the desired result will give companies a competitive advantage. By automating many of the processes that you are currently completing manually, you will allow these same individuals to work more efficiently and take on new tasks.
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