Articles

Polaroid was a company in recovery, needing to balance the Sales & Operations Planning functions in order to save money and resources. Ideally, planners could continually adjust SKU/sub-SKU demand and production while matching the business to marketplace realities. Polaroid with IBM created a solution to provide management with a continuous view of the future, enabling them to provide conscious, top-down direction.

Mark Payne is Vice President of Operations for Polaroid Corporation.

While there is no one right way to get started in BPM, there are some guidelines that will make your life a lot easier. It should be remembered that getting started in BPM will be based on a belief in process oriented operational improvement and your ability to sell BPM to your management.

Although BPM may well become a strategic initiative in your company, the simple fact is that it is unlikely that many BPM efforts will get started at the enterprise level with formal strategies and aggressive adoption plans.

For many organizations, business rules represent their core differentiating offerings. This is particularly true in industries where the product offering is actually a service that is implemented by complex software systems. The financial services industry, such as banking, insurance, finance, loan processing and credit cards, is a prime example of a domain (or many domains) where business rules take center stage and are the MVPs of differentiation.

Interest in business process management (BPM) continues to accelerate. Users increasingly offer the right responses to questions about their interest in BPM technology. Despite good business drivers, however, many companies struggle to get started. Too often, the business leaders can’t agree on what it means to be ‘adaptive’ or ‘more efficient.’ Until business leaders agree on process and performance goals and quantify metrics that reflect these objectives, any BPM initiatives will be investments in technology for technology's sake.