maureenoconnellscholasticin-blog

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Maureen O'Connell, Scholastic Inc's Exec. VP, CFO and CAO along with Clifford (the Big Red Dog) rang the opening bell at NASDAQ, to mark Valentine's day along with Clifford's birthday.

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The new arts books in celebration of 15 years of Harry Potter. Scholastic.

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Combining Business Process Management and Workflow

Every business today is aware of the importance of quick access to and fast delivery of organizational and business information. Business process management (BPM), which integrates workflow and applications, also requires automation of unstructured business processes to be totally successful. Streamlining business processes boosts productivity, profits and growth, and can save costs, improve process cycle times and power efficiency.

Workflow deals with human or computer-related transactions and processes having content, such as processing an insurance claim, opening a savings account, processing accounts payable or handling a customer complaint. Workflow can involve the flow of documents, business rules and archiving or web-access permissions. Workflow can highlight bottlenecks in the system but represents only part of the whole BPM picture.

BPM provides a complete management approach, encompassing and optimizing workflow in an integrated and dynamic framework, while generating a set of vital business metrics. BPM also increases organizational agility and efficiency, promotes process visibility, accountability and transparency and provides an audit trail. BPM allows users to identify and choose tasks to automate or eliminate from automation.

Automating workflow encompasses:

Identifying steps, personnel and applications involved in processing. This alone can highlight areas for workflow improvement.

Automating workflow to route tasks cost effectively and efficiently.

Integrating workflow between applications enterprise wide.

Why Automate Workflow?

Some of the reasons for automation are obvious. Automation is faster and more efficient, and it can reduce the risks of human error. Beyond that, however, automated workflow aids businesses in other ways:

It allows easy, quick execution and tracking of complex simultaneous processes.

It pinpoints specific processes during cycles, identifying the stage at which they occur, the personnel performing the task, and the next logical step in the process.

It assigns workflow to automated tasks, or, alternatively to people involved in the process (e.g., claims executive or customer desk representative).

It uses permission levels or other information in the business rules to route workflow to the proper personnel (e.g., a mortgage loan-processing document over $250,000 routed to the CFO).

It allows thousands of simultaneous users access to a thousand workflow completions (starts and stops).

Essentially, automating workflow routes correct processes to appropriate personnel at the right time.

Complex Simultaneous Transactions

Workflow eases those processes that need several processes or applications simultaneously. For instance, a customer relations officer takes an order from a new customer. The order must be approved and updated simultaneously in the customer database in line with credit permissions, inventory, shipping, accounts receivable and finance. Automating in this instance is quick, easy to track and leaves a clear trail, in accordance with legal requirements.

Pinpointing Specific Process Details

At any point during a specific process, users can check process status and change business rules as necessary within permission levels. For example, authorized users can prioritize a waiting queue of customer callers to service important business callers first, or they can authorize processing an insurance claim for a specific client faster in accordance with an SLA. Either way, automating workflow in a BPM environment allows companies to separate problems, provide better customer service and become more efficient and profitable.

To take another example, a company processing 10,000 mortgage loans a day could gain greater efficiency among its departmental strength of 50 people by separating problems into groups. For example, representatives could ask if the borrower is approved; if the terms, interest rate and limit are approved; and whether the limit needs additional approvals.

Assigning Workflow

Allowing the software to assign workflow either to an automated process or to a person makes companies more cost efficient. By automating the simpler processes, organizations can reduce costs and risk of errors, and by allocating more complex processes to people, they can offer their clientele a more sophisticated range of products and services. This helps businesses to remain competitive and add value to their services.

Working With Business Rules

Automated workflow works in accordance with business rules, using real-time feedback to change them when necessary. Business rules can define parameters like permission levels, authorization limits, exceptions and more. For example, a typical mortgage loan-processing task could set an authorization limit on the loan amount or ask for supervisory consent for a lower interest rate. The same task could seek permission for longer repayment terms or bad-credit loans, or route the request for quick processing within an identified time range for special borrowers. Alternatively, permission to cancel or to process payment could be sought.

Business rules are typically connected to underlying applications, but they can be flexible. Authorized users can easily re-define rules using the BPM module. If a borrower is late on payments, BPM allows users to move them elsewhere within the application by simply dragging or dropping them, or authorized users may access and keep tabs on loan-processing information online.

This flexibility allows companies to optimize processes. By analyzing workflow results (e.g., customer complaints on a new product launch), companies can tighten loopholes, eliminate superfluities, take action on products, increase inventory or provide additional training to CRM staff. Companies also can analyze workflow to achieve greater efficiency in end-end processing, by overcoming delays caused by external sources (i.e., customers). Workflow data also can be captured to comply with statutory requirements and standards.

Conclusion

Workflow works best with integration in a BPM environment, because it determines how processes connect beyond the boundaries of different applications throughout the company. This integration, when analyzed by using Business Applications Management (BAM), provides valuable workflow feedback. When that feedback is re-fed into the company's business rules it promotes workflow performance, boosts productivity, cuts costs and increases profits. The company can then reach its full growth potential.

Automating workflow allows companies to better manage processes in a BPM environment by giving them greater flexibility to balance and route workloads and processes. Companies with this flexibility can make real-time changes to become proactive at all levels. Finally, automation permits companies to measure performance against goals and expectations, and thereby improve their processes to achieve both.

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5 Trends In Business Process Management

The importance of business process management (BPM) for the future growth of organizations has been escalating due to greater levels of awareness. Initially, companies had used enterprise resource planning (ERP) initiatives to optimize operations management and customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives for service excellence. Later on however, the need for process and workflow efficiency as well as integration between automated and manual processes marked the need for process re-engineering. Processes were analyzed to map out the relationships between the various elements within. Redundant areas were identified and automation was introduced into the equation. The ultimate goal was to integrate automation with the human factor to develop efficient processes.

The concept of BPM grew out of the need to address the lack of reinforcement or continuous improvement adopted for these re-engineering efforts. Through BPM, the effectiveness of a process and its relationship with other processes is constantly monitored. Applications have been developed to assist users in analysis and process optimization tasks. Performance measurements are implemented to identify variances between actual performance and key performance indicators. This ensures that business processes are continuously optimized. Apart from that, BPM also supports the need to reevaluate or redesign processes in order to adapt to organizational changes, such as during an introduction of a new product or service.

In this sense, by keeping consistent tabs on performance, the BPM concept seems to have successfully addressed the changing needs of corporations.

What then lies ahead for BPM initiatives? How will BPM core practices be improved upon or redefined to cater to the changing needs of the business environment?

Trend #1. BPM will be evaluated from a business perspective, as opposed to a systems perspective.

One of the early characteristics of BPM is its tendency to be viewed from a systems perspective. However, the core driver of business excellence lies in the hands of the business people. Although BPM initiatives take the human element into consideration within its practices, the nature of its usage still pretty much confines it to the responsibility of the IT department.

With BPM applications developed for use by non-technical staff, it's clear that control on processes is reverting to people in business management. Part and parcel of business monitoring functions is visual monitoring with holistic process monitoring and reporting functions. Business units are ultimately the ones that need to have ease of control over their own processes, eliminating the need to generate special requests to the IT department.

Nevertheless, the role of the IT department is not to be sidelined. Its importance lies in its ability to collaborate with business users to identify requirements during the early stages of deployment and to assist in evaluation of potential applications to help with the automation.

Trend #2. We'll see easier integration with external applications.

Although the core of BPM lies in processes, applications have evolved to harness greater flexibility in the aspects of integration with other systems within the company. This reflects a changing need for BPM applications to be able to adapt to a dynamic business environment. One of these needs would be the integration of BPM with business intelligence, an aspect that is increasingly recognized as one of the key success factor for business performance excellence today.

In this sense, many BPM application vendors have begun integrating business intelligence aspects into their BPM modules. Instead of being process-driven, the trend for future BPM application products is towards execution-based structure, for the purpose of easier integration work.

Trend #3. BPM will play an increasingly important role in regulatory compliance.

The recent focus on regulatory compliance such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II has driven the need for corporations to access their existing business processes for greater visibility. Indeed, many companies have realized the benefits of using BPM for this purpose. BPM applications are upgraded to address this need, with an aim to provide enterprise-wide visibility on processes, in addition to greater functional control.

Thus, adherence to corporate governance requirements will become the underlying stimulant for the development in BPM now and in the future. In fact, even as the BPM market had reached a market size of $550 million in 2004, there are strong sentiments that this market will continue to enjoy strong growth over the next five years, driven by corporate mandates on compliance.

Trend #4. BPM will enjoy increased flexibility through service oriented architecture.

Survival in the business world lies partially in the ability for organizations to be agile. The utilization of the service oriented architecture (SOA) in a BPM context is a step up in meeting this need. Through SOA, process changes and alterations can take place within a shorter span of time. Activities such as mergers and acquisitions will see the integration of common applications into larger components with less interruption to business operations.

Trend #5. Business rules management will become ever more important.

The concept of business rules management (BRM) highlights another possible change coming for BPM. In the quest of optimizing business processes for greater productivity, the need to automate repeated processes to achieve faster processing speeds has surfaced. For instance, processes such as filing for an insurance claim or opening a bank account involve variable outcomes and decision processes based on inputs. In this sense, BRM aims to automate decisions for routine processes that had been structured with BPM methods.

Among the improvements realized for BRM initiatives is the ability to shorten processing time from a few days to just a few hours. Furthermore, online processes such as the instant approval of a credit application or setting up a new account for home Internet access also stand to benefit from BRM.

In conclusion, with the myriad of developments poised for BPM in line with the increasing recognition of its relevance in business excellence, there is no doubt that the BPM market will continue to grow. More and more companies have begun to identify uses for the concepts of BPM within various business functions. Indeed, the ability for BPM to adapt to the changing environment is a factor for its sustainability. This is why organizations remain loyal to the use of BPM or its extended versions in their quest to stay ahead of the competition.

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BPM Roles and Responsibilities

Implementing business process management (BPM) within your organization will require new job roles and possibly even a new organizational structure. That's the guidance offered by Gartner Research Director Michael Melenovsky in a presentation on staffing and structure in the process-driven organization that he gave at a Gartner conference.

As an example, Melenovsky shared a case study that profiled a "large multi billion-dollar manufacturing organization." This company, which he didn't name, had completed several BPM initiatives on a departmental scale, involving new customer acquisition, order entry, contact center, warrantee return, capital approval and employee benefits management. It was also experienced with Six Sigma and Lean methods. Based on the positive results of its BPM efforts, the company committed at a senior level to "embrace a more process-driven organization."

A major dimension of that was to tackle an enterprise-wide process -- "order to cash."

The objectives of the endeavor were threefold, Melenovsky said:

Reduce operating costs by 1.7% per year for the next five years as phases are implemented.

Increase customer satisfaction as measured by the company's customer satisfaction index.

Improve cash flow and return on assets.

A major question that frequently surfaces in BPM discussions is the role played by the IT organization, said Melenovsky. "There's hype in the marketplace [that BPM tools] placed in the hands of the businesspeople [gives them] the ability to evolve their process with no involvement of the IT organization," he said. "The IT organization will still be very involved in helping the organization become more process managed."

What will change, he said, is that as BPM technologies evolve, "more and more of what the IT pros did in business analysis, collecting requirements, will be moved into the business [side]. Business people may be changing their modes, but the testing of that still involves the IT organization."

The manufacturing firm Melenovsky profiled identified several important roles that needed to be developed, moved or modified within its ranks:

Business process analyst

Process architect

Process knowledge manager

Change management coordinator

Consultant

Business analyst

Business Process Analyst

This person deals with the more tactical aspects of BPM -- "discovering, validating, documenting and communicating business process-related knowledge through modeling, simulating and analyzing current and future states," writes Melenovsky in a Gartner research paper.

The role also maintains knowledge of who has the authority to make a particular kind of change with the process and to make sure that any ramifications downstream and upstream from the process have been checked over.

Typically, the BPA also does the data analysis and feeds key performance indicators to senior management.

In the case of the manufacturing company, the BPA reports to the line-of-business process owner. But during the initial project design and deployment, the analyst may answer to the project manager.

This wasn't always the case. For the first business process taken on, says Melenovsky, the modeling was actually done by the developers -- the same people doing the coding. They collected requirements, wrote functional specs, etc. From there, the company figured out that it needed to move that function out of the development group and have business analysts do the modeling in the business. That's the way the next two business processes were initiated. The last three BPM efforts were moved even closer to the process owner, when the role of business process analyst was introduced.

Process Architect

This person looks at the various processes in the organization and puts together architectures for process as well as a business rules. He or she works to resolve the inevitable differences that crop up between the business process analysts and business units. The job also involves "documenting the inter-relationships between processes and crafting a hierarchy of business processes, functional processes, sub processes and process components...tied to the enterprise's strategic initiatives," writes Melenovsky.

Where does the process architect come from? Melenovsky says it varies by company. "In manufacturing, it's common that they would have a process engineering group. In financial services institutions, it might be part of their IT organization or enterprise architecture group." It varies depending on how big the company is, he says.

Process Knowledge Manager

This individual "becomes a lightning rod for collecting best practices," writes Melenovsky. He or she frequently maintains the business rule repository, crafts process standards and maintains a database of consultants (internal and external) for specific projects.

Sometimes the work done in this role evolves into the creation of an entire team -- or even new venture. The manufacturing company, which sold around the world, had to understand tax laws and other regulations within each country where it operated. Those rules had to be identified and managed within the organization so that when sales people went into a sales opportunity, they had the latest information and could propose their product set appropriately. This wasn't something the company felt could be managed by an external service provider; so it handled the management internally. Eventually, the company set up a third-party entity, which it spun off.

Change Management Coordinator

Frequently, this person is a trainer. Melenovsky writes that the coordinator "has the role of instituting change early in the BPM initiative," by creating the course ware and workshops that will help people learn how to "do" BPM. As a particular process is identified, this person customizes the training around it.

Consultant

This role, writes Melenovsky, helps to get projects off the ground by hosting "discovery sessions with process participants, and assisting with communication challenges across functional areas of the organization." It may be an internal or external person. The role is to help the process owner understand what value they'll get out of the process.

Business Analyst

This role, which has typically resided in the IT organization, still exists and still reports into IT. This is the person who collects process requirements, says Melenovsky, and interprets those for the tech people.

But whereas the BPA has an intense focus on the customer (the line of business process owner), the BA has little focus in that direction. His or her job is to represent the IT perspective in process discussions.

The Role of the Visionary

Another crucial role that Gartner recognizes within the most successful BPM implementations (including the manufacturing company) is that of BPM visionary. "A company needs [somebody who] has the vision of what it means to be a process-managed organization," Melenovsky says.

The essence of BPM is to "capture the intellectual capital of the people who work for the organization and the process model captures the decision points the people make," he explains. The visionary is the person or group that recognizes the value of that effort and can continually rally people around it until it becomes engrained in the way the company works. It's that person's job to ask, "How are we going to continue improving our processes year after year?"

Frequently, it's the visionary who jump starts BPM work -- or recognizes the value of expanding on smaller BPM efforts -- within the company.

A North America survey by Gartner suggests that the visionary can come from anywhere. It may be the CEO or president; it may be the CIO or COO or general manager; it may be somebody in strategic planning; or it may be a person or group that represents a hybrid role, such as the head of a "center of excellence."

The IT organization plays a visionary role too. The same North America survey reports that 30% of companies respond that IT is driving the process management work; the other 70% say business is driving it. The results vary around the world, says Melenovsky. In Europe, the business ratio is higher. In Asia, it's even higher.

BPM Center of Excellence

The manufacturing firm profiled by Melenovsky set up a BPM center of excellence (COE). Led by a business process director or chief process officer, the COE facilitates process initiatives and helps build consensus for "what it means to be a process-managed enterprise," he writes.

The head of the COE in this case came from a management consulting firm that was doing process improvement engagements at the company and was hired by the COO. Gartner has seen "process champions" come from outside consulting firms more than once, Melenovsky writes. The COE may be created within the IT department (to make more technical services available), or it may be housed on the business side (to help get new projects off the ground and to make sure the direction and decisions stay focused on business goals).

Not only does the COE act as a facility for training and as a repository for best practices in the area of process management, at the manufacturing firm, but it's also the department where the business process architect resides, alongside the BPM knowledge manager, change management coordinator and consultants. Gartner sees a "greater number of Six Sigma-trained people joining BPM COEs to provide process-driven thinking and experience," writes Melenovsky.

Final Advice

In determining where the various roles and responsibilities should reside within an organization, Melenovsky reminds us, "The closer you move the process modeling, process analysis and management of business rules around the process owner, the more effective the business process management issue becomes."

Likewise, one size doesn't fit all. The manufacturing company had a great deal of process expertise -- and Six Sigma and Lean Method competency -- which they leveraged.

Melenovsky also emphasizes that the commitment of senior leadership to the process emphasis can have a major impact on its success. In the manufacturing organization, the sponsor of the BPM initiative is a senior VP who sits on the executive management team and reports to the group president. A group VP who leads the global manufacturing operations has the responsibility for the order-to-cash business process itself. Since the order-to-cash process cuts across several functional areas of the company, four VPs participate as functional representatives -- from sales, customer service, logistics services and corporate finance and accounting. That trickles down further, with directors, managers and supervisors owning various pieces of the process too. (A disadvantage of this approach, he says, is that "you can waste a lot of time if you dive into a process improvement initiative and you don't know who to go to for various aspects of approval.")

Although Gartner doesn't believe this level of management is essential for success, Melenovsky writes, a top-down assignment of responsibility "sends a strong message to the organization of ownership importance and clarity." In other words, it shows how important the company considers the work.

You need to look for ways to inspire process improvement, says Melenovsky. At the manufacturing concern, where responsibility was driven down as low in the organization as it could go, they encouraged people to come up with suggestions for how to improve the process. In six-month cycles, people received monetary bonuses based on the scale and scope of the suggestions implemented.

Finally, BPM isn't just about the tools being used, nor is it a one-time activity. BPM needs to permeate the "culture of the organization," he says. That involves constantly evolving roles and responsibilities, as well as on-going skills training and education.

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The BPM Pyramid: People, Processes And Technology

What do the words business process management, commonly known as BPM, really mean? Do they mean the same thing to everyone? Historically BPM is an outgrowth of a number of techniques: total quality management, Six Sigma, balanced scorecard and more. BPM is merely the term used to describe a set of techniques intended to provide a structured methodology around improving business process performance.

How to Change an Organization "How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one … but the bulb has got to want to change." It is an old joke, but the same applies to BPM; how many process engineers does it take to change an organization? One …but the organization has got to want to change – that is what makes BPM work. For the organization to want to change, the following must happen:     1.The right team of people need be empowered.     2.Those right people need to create, maintain and believing in those processes.     3.The processes should be enhanced by appropriately applying technology (optional). In order to succeed, the team must be invested in process management for the betterment of the organization; those responsible individuals will make the difference in executing the planning, implementation and maintenance of processes for continuous improvement. There is no easy solution; there is no magic buzzword, formula or tool that can substitute for the right combination of people, process and technology. A better way to consider the elements is not as peers, but rather as the people and their "willingness to change" as the essential foundation of BPM success. People in BPM In the book Good to Great, author Jim Collins states that "the right people are your company’s most important asset. It is the people who will determine the success or otherwise of your BPM project." In low-efficiency operations, people are often substituted for processes when organizations are not able to achieve the end-to-end business process for various reasons (lack of priority, too expensive, complexity, organizational structure challenges, etc.). Inevitably, more people are hired and small kingdoms are autonomously formed by a growing number of leaders. These, then, are the last people who are likely to be motivated to create efficient processes – why would they want to reduce staff when they spent so much time building their own departments? People have a tremendous impact on the ability to create and sustain process improvement. Denying the need of having the right people denies the ability to improve processes at their crux. It is convenient to blame poor processes or tools for inefficiencies without taking ownership of the people problem. The Process in Business Process Management It is only after the right people are ready, willing and able to approach business process challenges that it is time to tackle the middle tier of the BPM pyramid – process. It is important to get the processes right before adding technology. The company should analyze its processes to find its weakest links. It is easy to recognize the patterns – for example:     1.For generic process A, a person goes to a website and inputs the required information     2.A cryptic message is email to the person with instructions to make a phone call to complete the process transaction     3.Based on confusing information, the person prints the data, calls the phone number as instructed and has to verbally repeat part of the information that previously entered on the website     4.In lieu of trying to follow the process the "normal" (and problematic) way, the person may decide to contact a fellow staffer who knows how to navigate through the chaos or otherwise take advantage of workarounds to avoid the process’ challenges This type of process experience is common and sometimes not even acknowledged as inefficient. Instead consider a company with an empowered and educated team of the right people who want to implement great processes. This type of process experience is common and sometimes not even acknowledged as inefficient. Instead consider a company with an empowered and educated team of the right people who want to implement great processes. What an exciting place to work! The team is working together, able to speak about data and information in non-personal terms, with documented inputs, outputs and end-to-end processes. When this team believes that their mission is to achieve the desired, measurable result, there is a glimmer of self-actualization and confidence in making the right decisions; the team is on its way to value chain performance. This success and feeling of accomplishment helps to empower the entire team. Its view shifts to continually improving the company’s processes, using whatever means are available to properly convey understanding. Through the visualization and participation in the business process models, the team strengthens and solidifies its effectiveness. As the team increases its understanding of the inputs, outputs and hand-offs with external organizations and teams, upper management comes together in helping to solve the big picture results for the enterprise. Adding Technology to BPM In the words of Bill Gates, "The first rule of any technology is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second rule is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency." With a firm foundation of the right people working to continually monitor and improve the right processes, an applied technology or tool can make the processes more efficient. The danger of applying the technology – without the right people and process already in place – is that the processes will become more confusing and more costly to sort out. When a company is able to fully document the underlying business processes and the employees are engaged and managing the value chain with measurable and meaningful results, then (and only then) is the time to explore technology solutions. BPM is necessary for long-term, sustainable growth and viability in the evolving, increasingly competitive global economy. In order to survive, companies need to embrace BPM. To develop a BPM approach, BPM must be viewed not as a project, but instead as the way of working in a business environment. The BPM pyramid can guide a company as it prioritizes the essential components and activities that enable effective business process management.

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10 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Business with BPM

There are few things more satisfying in business than resolving a "high visibility" problem within a short timeframe and being able to demonstrate clear value and/or hard savings as a result. If you seek this kind of recurring dose of high job satisfaction, you don't need to change companies to find it. Your organization is probably already full of process-related "pain points" and thus, ripe with opportunities for make meaningful improvements to the business. Ask any C-level executive how many issues they're facing tied to "Can't see it," "Can't control it," "Can't track it," "Can't take cost out of it" and "Can't standardize it."

In this article I'm going to describe 10 things that business process management (BPM) software can help you with. From this perspective, I believe you will be in a better position to identify places where BPM technology can have an immediate impact on your business.

1. Eliminating Mundane Work

Every company has resources tied up in and even dedicated to non-value-added work. Examples include re-keying information from one system to another, pulling information and routing it, populating Excel spreadsheets (rather than spending time manipulating the data or applying judgment to the output) and babysitting the progress of a highly-manual process. BPM software can automate mundane work through the application of business rules. This means that while some employees will get more work done, others will be freed up completely to work on more value-added work.

2. Sustaining Compliance

These days, companies have pretty solid documentation around their compliance-regulated processes. But documentation often only shows what people are supposed to be doing; it doesn't necessarily track what people are actually doing. And while enterprise applications have embedded workflow capabilities, once that process leaves that application, there's no tracking mechanism. BPM software provides an internal control framework that spans all of the people and systems that participate in a compliance-affected process.

Bear in mind that compliance can mean more than SOX and HIPAA; it also means adherence to internal policies and procedures, as well. The sweet spot for BPM technology is any process that involves more than a single system and a heavy dose of manual activity.

3. Extending Out Enterprise Applications

Customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and enterprise content management (ECM) software all trigger processes that involve people who don't have the triggering application on their desktop. The only people who can participate in a process triggered by the enterprise application are those with a seat license to the software.

This uncovers two problems. First, it's not cost effective to purchase seat licenses for everyone who has to participate in the process. Second, many people won't use the application because it wasn't designed for them. (When was the last time you saw a salesperson eager to use the company's ERP system?). BPM software hooks into enterprise applications and delivers an enterprise-wide process capability that lets people plug into the process using software they already have and already know how to use (such as Microsoft Office, email, Internet Explorer, etc.). Buy seat licenses for those for whom it makes sense; don't waste your money on everyone else.

4. Simplifying People's Jobs

Learning new software isn't fun. It also delays the ramp time needed to achieve an acceptable level of productivity. Even when they get there, employees find their effectiveness forever hindered because they're being asked to work how the software wants them to work. So if Jill were hired for her experience and judgment surrounding risk assessment, why are you forcing her to spend three weeks learning the company's proprietary, legacy system?

BPM software can take data out of existing systems and repurpose it into the format the user is most comfortable with. How much happier would Jill be if she never had to access that antiquated program -- and could simply receive the data she needs pre-populated in an Excel spreadsheet template that she designed? The same process may require input from the legal department, and they often prefer to work in Word and Adobe PDFs. In all cases, this approach requires nothing new to install and nothing new to learn. BPM software can present the right information to the right people at the right time in the right format to put your employees in the best position to add value to your business.

5. Reducing Risk

Just making people's jobs less complicated and enforcing existing policies will reduce the risk of mistakes being made. Beyond that, however, there are two other types of risk that BPM software alleviates.

First is the elimination of the "I never saw that coming" problems that every company faces. BPM software yields full, enterprise-wide visibility into every step (manual or automated) of a business process so that you can track things going awry and step in to "course correct" before a permanent, negative impact happens. Business rules offer automatic escalations in the case of non-responsiveness. How many times have your processes been slowed down because someone was on vacation and everything was being held up in his or her inbox? In other words, "balls will no longer be dropped."

The second involves reducing the risk your company has with respect to human capital. Every organization has that one process that only "Bob" knows how to do. Well, what happens if "Bob" is out of the picture? BPM software lets you alleviate that risk by building Bob's "know how" into the process.

6. Knocking Out Process-Related "Pain Points" or Nits

Every company has "workarounds" because existing systems have gaps in their ability to meet all of its needs and/or they're too cumbersome to use; thus people avoid using them.

I was recently at a Fortune 500 manufacturing company that requires its salespeople to use an ERP application to submit their expenses. As you can imagine, this is going over about as well as taking people's morning coffee away. As a result, people circumvent the process -- thereby creating more work for other people along the way.

Why not let salespeople use Excel and email to complete their expenses? BPM can manage the approval process and then feed the data into the ERP system for them. A Midwest-based healthcare firm has struggled to standardize its month-end close accounting process that involves dozens of locations. Why not standardize around a single Excel template and let BPM handle the data consolidation and manage the process? Most companies I know have many nits that can be addressed pretty quickly with BPM software.

7. Establishing Full Visibility into How Your Business Operates

Within the context of an enterprise-wide process, visibility and control gaps exist in what I like to call the "white space." The white space is the work that's done by people in between the enterprise systems where visibility does exist.

White space typically makes up more than 30% of an enterprise-wide process, and this is where blindness occurs. Take the complex sales process, for example. Any time a customer requests a custom price, product, term and/or condition to the contract, it can't be entirely managed inside a CRM application. Finance has to "run the numbers" to make sure it's a good deal, legal has to "drum up" new contract language and in some cases (depending on the type of company), solutions engineers have to design a new solution. BPM software "connects the dots" among all of the people and systems that play a key role in an enterprise-wide process, rendering much greater visibility where spotty visibility currently exists. It's the difference between telling people what they're supposed to be doing and tracking what people are actually doing.

8. Building an Agile Infrastructure

Typical IT projects take 12-18 months to implement. The problem is that things change between the time they're captured in the requirements gathering phase to the time they're rolled out into production. That leaves you with an expensive system that does about three-quarters of what you were hoping it would do and that turns out to be "painful" to make changes to.

The right perspective is that your business will always change because business is fluid. BPM software is built for iterative change, especially those that feature "zero code" implementations. Building out a "process infrastructure" on BPM software means that you're not just solving today's problem; you're incorporating sustainable agility and responsiveness into your organization's DNA so that your business can keep up with imminent change. Updates to the process can be made in hours and days, not weeks and months. This is a "game changing" competitive advantage to most businesses.

9. Reducing the Burden on IT

IT continues to have more on its plate than it has the capacity to deliver. So what if business people could implement their own solutions and run their own projects? BPM software lets business people "own" their processes (modeling, deploying and updating). The updating piece is really the most critical at reducing the burden on IT. Change requests over-burden IT more than requests for new technology. Not only does BPM software make changes easier (see point 8, building an agile infrastructure), but also they can be performed by business people. They can make their own changes and free up IT resources to work on other back office initiatives.

10. Building a Process Infrastructure

Thought leading IT departments have already realized that BPM software can provide an attractive alternative to "rip and replace" when it comes to updating a company's IT infrastructure. By deploying a process layer that sits on top of existing IT systems, IT departments can put in place a faster-to-deploy, cheaper to roll out, easier-to-manage and more user-friendly IT infrastructure. Existing systems are integrated via Web services. People are plugged into the process via email, Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. BPM software provides a scalable platform that can span the automated and manual activities that makes up your business.

So, there you have it -- 10 concrete ways that people-centric BPM software can have an immediate and positive impact on your business.