As BPM technologies and solutions mature, some organizations are now beginning to develop enterprise-wide BPM strategies. The most important aspects of an effective enterprise BPM deployment strategy are unrelated to the solution or even to the application being implemented. They’re best practices that apply no matter what software you’re using and regardless of the department in which you’re deploying it. Here are three best practices that we advise our clients to keep in mind as they move forward with their BPM strategies.
1. Identify the right pilot BPM project
Carefully select the specific project for a single department that can serve as a formal test case to demonstrate and measure the success of BPM and help justify the benefits of expanding the strategy enterprise-wide. The pilot area should directly support the most immediate strategic goal of the organization – whether that’s to enhance customer service, to more rapidly introduce a new product, or to reduce process time to gain competitive advantage.
The selection of a pilot project is highly dependent on an organization’s particular business strategy. One of our clients, a large County government, chose the child abuse reporting process as its first pilot, as this project would most clearly benefit the goal of providing demonstrable public service in a critical area. A mortgage processor targeted mortgage loan origination to address its competitive strategy of shorting the time to origination. An auto manufacturer focused on streamlining its widely distributed accounts payable processes, which supported the business goal of providing best-in-class services across the organization. These pilots were chosen not because they necessarily demonstrated a quick ROI, but because they had the potential to improve processes that were critical to the business strategy of the organization.
2. Set up affinity groups
Many organizations fail in the post-pilot phase of deployment planning. While they exert themselves to choose the pilot process for automation and make sure it is successful, they rarely put the same amount of effort into the subsequent roll-out to other departments and processes. Organizations that wait until after the pilot is completed to begin planning for the next deployment are making a mistake.
Organizations need a well-designed, phased deployment plan that takes into account the many potential BPM projects. A best-practice approach to planning is based on identifying affinity groups – departments that share processes, documents/files, and data. Examples include departments that share common administrative functions, such as finance and accounting, sales and marketing, or customer service. These departments or operational units may be able to deploy the same BPM solution, thereby taking advantage of cross-departmental process efficiencies and reducing the costs for implementation, support, and training.
3. Determine required organizational changes
Because an enterprise BPM strategy may require some organizational changes in order to be successful, it is critical to assess the level of change required. For example, BPM strategies typically impact multiple systems and applications in the organization, including ERP systems, financial applications, content management systems, and integration services. Implementing a BPM strategy in many instances means changing the way people do things and how they use their systems, even if the core processes aren’t fundamentally altered.
In preparing for these types of organizational changes, it helps to centralize BPM expertise, which, in large organizations, is usually dispersed throughout different areas of IT. Some organizations do this by establishing a “BPM Center of Excellence” that serves as an expert focus group for evaluating, researching, and implementing BPM technologies. Representatives can include the IT and system integrator staff involved in the pilot and subsequent BPM implementations. If the affinity group deployment approach has been adopted, IT support, BPM system administrator staff, and key business users from the departments can also participate, sharing experiences and best practices.
There’s no getting around the fact that building a successful enterprise BPM strategy is a complex undertaking, involving many steps and individuals. But the results are well worth the effort it takes to put a strategy in place. Organizations that streamline processes enterprise-wide using the best-practices approach outlined here will realize benefits in performance and competitive advantage that will directly impact their bottom lines.
