Document Management

03/09/2009 - Success During Tough Times with Process Improvement

SUCCESS DURING TOUGH TIMES WITH PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking true economic value. Companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business, so go beyond traditional approaches and focus on aligning all the work do to the reason why we exist – the customer.

Business Process Management (BPM) offers the opportunity to rethink the way we run our organisations. It aligns the four facets of every business: People, Processes, System and Strategy eliminating barriers on the road to achieving process excellence. This is what BPM is all about.

If this interests you, eCom can show you our successes and how we have helped large New Zealand and Australaian organisations ensure their processes and systems work first time, every time to reduce operational costs by as much as 40%.

The glory days seem far behind as stock prices fall, retail sales plummet, budgets are cut, and global markets struggle. Both businesses and government organisations are looking for ways to dramatically reduce costs, do more with less, and basically just survive. But is there a smarter way to weather the storm than blind cost-cutting and headcount reductions? The answer is yes, and the results are proven. Most companies are using what seems to be a logical approach – cut, cut, cut. Cut people, cut budgets, cut travel, switch to lower cost suppliers – anything that results in an immediate reduction to expenses. But, in essence, these organisations are just starving themselves and it will likely come back to haunt them as the core infrastructure of the company – the corporate metabolism – is crippled to the point where it cannot function effectively. As the market begins to rebound, these companies will continue to struggle and be left behind. So instead of blindly cutting costs, the most-effective approach for both short-term and long-term success is to invest – but invest in the right things.

INVEST IN BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Why cut blindly when you can invest in a solution that will immediately improve process efficiency and employee productivity across the board? BPM is designed to automate and improve people-intensive business processes – the processes that are often the most manual and therefore the slowest and most cost-intensive. Instead of forever chasing content to complete work tasks, let your content find people and resources to complete processes quickly and efficiently with unparalleled levels of efficiency and visibility. While BPM delivers value in many ways, let’s focus on five compelling reasons BPM is a good investment in the best of times, let alone a recession:

1. Fast, measurable cost savings.

Organisations that have deployed BPM consistently report a return on investment of at least 10-20% per process project. This return is fueled by a dramatic and recurring cost savings, as well as increased productivity and effectiveness. Customers of BPM often cite savings of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on an annual basis.

2. Increased efficiency.

The process automation that BPM enables results in greater throughput with the same or fewer resources allowing you to either deliver more or reduced overhead by eliminating or redeploying resources that are no longer needed to meet objectives. In just one example, eCom was able to reduce Call Centre activity within a Loan Origination process by 60% simple by delivering confidence in reduced cycle times.

3. Extract value out of existing investments.

By acting as a single process layer across disparate and distributed systems, BPM allows you to extend the value of your existing ERP, mainframe and other legacy applications. BPM provides the single interface needed to improve business processes, create new processes, and modernise your operations without undertaking costly core system replacements or upgrades. Users of BPM frequently cite the value of extending ERP and mainframe functions at a fraction of the time and cost that would be required to build the process improvements directly on these native systems.

4. Lowered risk

Many of our current economic troubles can be traced back to a lack of discipline and oversight of key business practices. BPM allows you to completely document processes, enforce adherence through process automation and business rules, and monitor and audit both human and system activities at all levels of the organisation. This transparency and visibility ensures that you are in the best possible position to monitor your operations and minimize risk.

5. Greater visibility into dead weight

Once a process is deployed using BPM, all of the inner workings of that process become transparent. Management can leverage reports and dashboards in real time to identify unneeded or underutilised systems and roles and make educated and informed decisions on the best way to eliminate overhead – without impacting performance or customer service. Likewise, high-cost areas can be scrutinised with the simulation capabilities, so that process changes can be made to improve the profitability, efficiency, and effectiveness of the overall process.

6. Agility

BPM is a discipline that enables greater business agility in three important ways. It allows faster and better-informed decisions, reduces the process revision cycle time, and promotes consensus for rapid adoption of changes.

While the outcome of automated processes may result in headcount reductions, this is not the primary goal. Most employees that embrace BPM actually improve their standing in the organisation and improve the quality of the work that they are doing on a daily basis. Mundane, back office administrative tasks can easily be handled by the system allowing employees to move to the frontline providing better service to customers, and identify new ways to further improve processes – delivering even greater value to the organisation.

With this approach, BPM becomes a catalyst for positive change. Investing in BPM now is a smart short-term decision and will help you to not only survive, but to gain ground during the recession. In addition, it strengthens your corporate infrastructure – making you more effective and more agile so that as the economy improves, your metabolism is primed to take advantage of new opportunities better, faster and more profitably than your competitors.

For more information please contact eCom on +649 357 0875