Resources in Business Process Management (BPM)

You are in charge of retooling business processes for customer services. Your analysis found that several regional service centers can use a common set of standardized, streamlined business processes to improve customer service and reduce business expenditures. Unfortunately, each business unit relies on unique, back-end applications that perform similar, yet conflicting and redundant functions. This could undermine the entire initiative.

BPMInstitute's State of Business Process Management study, released 8/2/2004, shows that companies are, indeed, seeking to transform themselves into process-centric organizations and consider this transformation to be critical to the company’s future success. Responding enterprises agreed that effectively architecting and managing a process-driven enterprise requires strategic planning of business goals, identification of mission-critical business processes and specification of desired process improvement outcomes

A few years ago, when I was heading up the telecommunications industry group for a Fortune 500 software company, we had a saying, “There’s no such thing as a standard price quote.” Virtually every deal called for special pricing relative to the particular needs of the customer, whether scope of deployment, customization or a host of other factors. So rather than closing business based on pre-set pricing guidelines, the salespeople had to literally walk every deal through a fairly onerous approvals routine, involving lots of phone calls, emails, faxes and spreadsheets.

Attendees at the 2004 Business Process Management conferences held in Chicago and San Francisco indicated their company’s desire to transform themselves into process-centric organizations and considered this transformation to be critical to the company’s future success.