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Is your BPM project set up for success or failure?

Knowing what your BPM success will look like before you even begin will help you achieve it. So will knowing what are the most common causes of failure. We learn more from failure than success, but it’s easier, cheaper and quicker to learn from others’ mistakes rather than go through the pain personally, right?

BPM projects fail more often as a result of missed expectations than inadequate technology. In this book you will learn how to create and present a credible business case and plan for success, starting with the chapter “The BPM Success Manifesto.”

The value of BPM is realized through planning and measurement, and the business case needs to be developed with transparent success criteria and “real world” metrics. In addition to the highly insightful and instructional white papers contributed by industry thought leaders, this book provides compelling award-wining case studies written by those who have been through the full BPM experience.

These case studies describe successful ROIs and competitive advantages gained through BPM and the writers also generously share solid advice on how to avoid the pitfalls they personally encountered – and overcame.

BPM is essential to a company's survival in today's hyper-speed business environment.

BPM done right empowers an enterprise to compete at the highest level in any marketplace. BPM done right delivers continuous business transformation.

So it is absolutely essential to understand how to avoid doing BPM wrong: in fact, your business depends on it.

Contents and Chapter Abstracts

These case studies describe successful ROIs and competitive advantages gained through BPM and the writers also generously share solid advice on how to avoid the pitfalls they personally encountered– and overcame.

These examples present great learning opportunities for you (read a lot more inside the book):

• Ensure representation from all relevant departments during process study and planning, including  the IT department<
• Don’t attempt to establish perfect specifications of a process without prototyping
• Removing paper doesn’t mean you have gone “paperless.” Make sure to capture data as well as routing data along with documents enables true workflow automation
• BPM is extremely fast and flexible which drives the business and IT to try to use BPM for solutions that aren’t true processes.
• Managing Demand – without a solid governance and prioritization process the BPM backlog can get unmanageable
• Don’t underestimate the true number of process steps (some may not be apparent in legacy world)
• Use an experienced Agile Coach: Projects which “try to be agile” may fail easily. Make sure you have enough experience and commitment of customers, business analysts and developers before you start.

BPM is essential to a company's survival in today's hyper-speed business environment. BPM done right empowers an enterprise to compete at the highest level in any marketplace. BPM done right delivers continuous business transformation.
So it is absolutely essential to understand how to avoid doing BPM wrong: in fact, your business depends on it.

Contents and Chapter Abstracts

Foreword

Keith Swenson, WfMC Chair, Vice President of R&D, Fujitsu America Inc., USA

This year, a number of experts came together on line, and worked out a comprehensive definition for BPM. This new standard definition is designed to be short enough to use regularly, without gratuitous words. Keith Swenson also offers substantial clarification on what BPM is – and is not.

The Top 5 Reasons Why a BPM Project Fails

Peter Schooff, Managing Editor, BPM.com, USA

BPM is essential to a company's survival in today's hyper-speed business environment. But BPM often requires business transformation, and that's really just another word for business change. Anyone with any business experience will tell you, anything that requires business change involves a high risk of failure.

And the hard truth is, the greater the need for BPM in an organization, the greater the risk for failure. So why do projects fail? This chapter looks at the top five reasons.

The BPM Success Manifesto

Nathaniel Palmer, BPM, Inc. (BPMI), USA

Business Process Management (BPM) is a discipline involving any combination of modeling, automation, execution, control, measurement and optimization of business activity flows, in support of enterprise goals, spanning systems, employees, customers and partners within and beyond the enterprise boundaries. This is the first consensus-led definition of BPM to emerge since it emerged as an identifiable software segment more than a decade ago. Yet it goes to the heart of what is driving interest in BPM today – the ability to improve and automate how we manage both our business processes and the information that supports them.
Nathaniel Palmer discusses impact of new technologies, the mandate for greater transparency, and how the ongoing aftershocks of globalization have collectively removed nearly any trace of predictability within the business environment. As a result, sustainable competitive advantage no longer comes from scale and efficiency but adaptability – the ability to process streams of information flows, make sense of these, and rapidly translate these into effective responses designed for precision rather repeatability.

How Strategic are Your BPM Initiatives? Four Questions to Ask Yourself

Charles Farina, Essroc Cement Corp., USA

Gone are the days when process excellence was just about standardization, cost cutting, or quality. In today’s businesses, process is about enabling business strategy. So how sure are you that your BPM program stacks up?
One way to start addressing this question is to evaluate what you’re doing with respect to the characteristics of Strategic BPM. With these requirements in place, your BPM actions will be integrated with your company’s organizational objectives – resulting in strategic alignment!
The author emphasizes that BPM is not something that you do on top of everything else. It’s a key part of how you manage the business.

BPM Empowers the Digital Enterprise

Pedro Robledo, BPMteca.com, Spain

The Digital Economy, globalization, social and environmental problems, natural disasters, the threat of terrorism, migration waves... are conditioning companies to make urgent situation analysis exercises and strategic processes to be competitive and to maintain their companies with solvency. Aspects such as delinquency management, debt control, control margins, risk management... are highly relevant and priority processes.
Pedro Robledo reviews disruptive technologies arising from SMACT - Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud, Things - and details how organizations with a management approach should document, automate, analyze and monitor business processes, but not in terms of functions (marketing, sales, production, customer service...) but in terms of processes from start to finish and across all functional boundaries; understanding business processes as a sequence of activities to support the strategy, analyze operational effectiveness and facilitating the establishment of performance measures for continuous improvement.

Exploiting Business Architecture for Process Excellence

Lloyd Dugan, BPM, Inc. (BPMI), USA

Business Process Management (BPM) is a term that has regrettably come to mean too many different things to too many different but related practitioner communities, including process automation, process modeling, process improvement, business or enterprise architecture, etc. Worse still is that none of these communities fully and consistently define BPM as something that unifies and integrates its interdisciplinary nature. Instead, provincial interests have led some communities to balkanize (or fragment) what BPM means in order to assert methodological superiority or to gain market share or both.
Lloyd Dugan discusses, how, in many ways, BPM as a practice area is at a crossroads, wherein it, too, can give way to a successor concept (as BPM itself was to workflow) or it, as the preferred alternative, can evolve to be all of what it should have been in the first place, aka BPM 2.0.

Using Analytics to Identify Process Opportunities

Frank F. Kowalkowski, Knowledge Consultants, Inc., USA

Because processes are critical to business execution, process performance management and improvement have become two key aspects of BPM for improving business performance. These two key process approaches form the basis of enterprise transformation, integration and consolidation within the enterprise. They also support integration across enterprises and form the foundation for e-commerce, e-government and enterprise excellence. Organizations are good at assessing due diligence regarding financial, market and legal issues. However, studies (Michael Porter and others) show that most structural changes requiring integration fail due to operational (read process) and/or cultural incompatibilities. Both of these issues can be addressed with some core process and cultural analytics.
Frank Kowalkowski shows how all this leads to a need for process management that achieves a lean, compliant and more flexible enterprise. Process management and process methodology can provide process analytics at specific points in the methodology to reduce the failure rate. Management of processes should also include analytics that form the basis of monitoring continuous improvement of the enterprise as well as the processes through a process performance reporting system, often via business intelligence tools.

Learning from the Leaders

Prof. Mark von Rosing, Maria Hove, Henrik von Scheel

When you take the time to compare your own knowledge to that of others, you become better at learning. This is not a new phenomenon or concept; this is a basic reason why so many organizations want their employees to work together, to collaborate, and/ or to create the circumstances for them to share knowledge. The growing amount of software that supports collaboration to enable effective mutual learning is a confirmation of this trend. This chapter looks at why it’s important to read the BPM case studies in this book, what we can learn from them and how we can make the most of them.

Success in BPM: Award-winning Case Studies

Bank Dhofar

Nominated by Newgen Software Technologies Limited, India

Established in 1990, Bank Dhofar commenced operations with two branches, in Muscat and Salalah. Today it is one of the fastest growing Banks in the Sultanate of Oman, with a strong presence in Corporate Banking, Consumer Banking, Treasury Banking and Project Finance. The bank realized that to facilitate and manage the growth of its retail assets, it needed to enhance its operational capacity, productivity, and ability to scale-up operations. Automation of key business processes was identified as a key imperative. The bank decided to automate two of its key business processes, Retail Loan Origination (covering Home Loan & Personal Loan), and Credit Card Processing.
The Loan Origination process is highly regulated and data-intensive, requiring input and feedback at multiple steps throughout the loan cycle. The bank realized that there was a strong need for a solution that could effectively digitize and handle the effective flow of the documents from across the process life-cycle. Further, to keep up with the demands of the ever-increasing customer-base, the bank needed a solution for end-to-end automation and centralization of its credit card processing and approval systems.
After evaluating a host of solutions, Bank Dhofar decided to go with a solution comprising a proven Business Process Management (BPM) platform, an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform, and a Scanning and Digitization suite, for end-to-end automation of its Retail Loan Origination and Credit Card Approval processes. The solution offered enhanced business flexibility, better credit risk management, and rules-based processing, resulting in improved business performance for the bank.

HCL IBS, United Kingdom

Nominated by Corporate Modelling, UK

HCL IBS is an outsourcer carrying out policy administration and affiliated services in the UK closed book Life Assurance and Pensions market place. We deliver those services to demanding commercial SLAs, cheaper than the insurance companies with whom we contract.  Our client contracts are on a “per policy” basis so revenue from those contracts reduces year on year in line with the attrition of each book of business. HCL IBS also have to meet stringent and emerging UK regulatory requirements. In 2009, as a response to this challenge we began a journey to deliver immediate reductions in operations costs (c.30%) and ongoing ability to control costs whilst improving people productivity.
We have benefited from more than a 15% increase in the number of transactions processed per person (FTE). This has been a key enabler to delivering more for less. Within the first year, we also realized a progressive reduction in overall operating costs of c. 15%. These savings have enhanced our competitive standing and reputation allowing us to profile new opportunities to gain market share. In addition, upcoming releases and implementation of improved and additional workflow functionality will cause further savings putting us well on track for our targeted 30% reductions.

HML, UK

Nominated by IBM, UK

HML responds faster to customer communications, streamlining workflows for incoming correspondence with IBM Business Process Manager. When your business depends on your clients' trust, you need to make sure that you meet their expectations, not just most of the time, but all the time. To ensure that it is serving customers effectively, HML works to strict service level agreements (SLAs), which are agreed individually with each client. The company constantly looks to improve its performance in this area. HML receives up to 30,000 letters, 50,000 emails and 5,000 faxes from customers or a diverse range of third parties each month. Each item of correspondence will initiate one of 80 corresponding processes, depending on the type of request received.
Customer correspondence is now processed in an efficient manner allowing for improved response times. Saved £400,000 from reduced manual processing and £150,000 from consolidating processing onto a single platform. Flexible solution enables new functionality to be developed quickly, with no need to invest in additional software.

Liberty University, USA

Nominated by BizFlow, USA

Liberty University is the largest private, nonprofit university in the United States. It has grown more than 1000% since 2003 and 100% since 2010. In order to both enable and support such growth, Liberty has invested heavily in technology infrastructure and automation. Liberty uses BPM to continually improve process efficiencies, user effectiveness, and overall customer services with students and staff.
In this paper, Liberty describes how it started with BPM and BPM Suites and where it has implemented BPM beginning with Student Financial Aid. To date, Liberty has reduced Verification record processing 42% from 12 minutes per record to 7 minutes per record while increasing the number of records processed by 25% (13,826 to 18,349 records). More than 10 other processes have been fully automated.

Prince Sultan Military Medical City, Saudi Arabia

Nominated by Bizagi, UK

Prince Sultan Military Medical City (PSMMC) formerly known as The Riyadh Military Hospital (RMH) is located in Riyadh City and considered as one of the most advanced medical centres in the Middle East. PSMMC is the Medical Services Department (MSD) for the Ministry of Defense (MOD). The hospital now has a capacity of more than 1,400 beds and employs over 12,000 staff.
Key challenges faced by the hospital were related to patient safety. These included identifying the right patient, providing the right treatment to the right patient and preventing identification fraud and misuse of medical services by patients.
Existing legacy system used by the Patient Affairs department could not address these challenges. A BPM system was introduced to streamline and manage the improved processes of various departments associated with Patient Affairs. PSMMC has already had a positive experience after the Family and Community Department, Al-Wazarat Health Centre (WHC), was automated with over 70 processes last year. The system delivered end to end patient care for over 2,000 outpatients. The success of the first BPM initiative encouraged the PSMMC management team to consider the same BPM solution for this much larger initiative which required the end-to end automation of a 1400 bed hospital, serving the big part of the city.
Key drivers for both projects was to deliver a highly intuitive system that medical professionals can use daily and easily and that helps to improve patients care and reduce costs.

PSCU, United States

Nominated by OpenText, Canada

PSCU is one of the largest credit union services organizations in the U.S., representing close to 700 credit unions. PSCU implemented OpenText Assure in 90 days, enabling them to realize significant cost savings, improve customer service and satisfaction, and increase efficiencies, The Assure application factory provides out-of-box, industry best practice components to ensure a quick time-to-value and continuous process improvement. PSCU Customer Service Agents use the Assure Work Center to manage requests and resolve issues very quickly. The PSCU customers at the credit unions use the self-service portal to log requests and monitor the status of requests in real-time.
The BPM CoE team was instrumental in delivering a successful solution in such a short time frame. This team combined BPM and Six Sigma specialists to bridge the gap between IT and the business and build trust and collaboration, which was a huge advantage. After implementing Assure, PSCU was able to increase customer satisfaction levels as was noted in recent customer surveys, and by using the out-of-the-box reporting tools, they can now identify trends, predict issues, and proactively identify new service needs. Assure allows PSCU to respond faster and more efficiently to customer requests, process double the amount of requests with the same amount of staff, and has eliminated 90% of the paper in the process, saving them over $300,000 annually. This is a competitive advantage that PSCU is able to offer free-of-charge to the credit unions.

Right of Way, Department of Transport of Abu Dhabi, UAE

Nominated by DoT, United Arab Emirates

The Department of Transport (DoT), in line with the overall strategy for the government of Abu Dhabi, has identified the need to improve customer care as a key objective. They consider their customers one of their greatest assets. One of the key drivers for this project was the improvement of customer care through the identification and implementation of a leading NOC application and approvals procedure to create clear impact on both internal and external customers.
All contractors, consultants and developers in the emirate of Abu Dhabi of the United Arab Emirates are required to obtain No Objection Certificates (NOCs) from the DOT for any intended con­struction within the Emirates’ Rights of Way.
As outlined in this document the main objective was to significantly improve the application process required to obtain the Departments approval for third parties to undertake work within the Rights of Way. This was achieved through the development of the online NOC System as a single contact point for receiving NOC applications and to facilitate the expediting the issuing of consolidated NOCs on behalf of the DOT.

Refinery of the Pacific, Ecuador

Nominated by AuraPortal (AURA), USA

Refinery of the Pacific Eloy Alfaro is a mixed economy institution created through a strategic alliance between PDVSA and Petroecuador to build, operate and sustain a complex 300K BPD refinery, to be constructed in two (2) phases, starting with a capacity of 200K BPD with Ecuadorian crude. This alliance contemplates the implementation of process units with profound conversion technology, required for the production of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, LPG and chemical bases, in order to satisfy the local market and to export the surplus.

Swiss Federal Railways SBB

Nominated by ti&m AG, Switzerland

The Swiss are world champions in using their railways - on average a Swiss citizen travels 2258km per year on the railway network. As a consequence the railway system is heavily used and the quality of service has to be high according to Swiss standards which also means the processes for rail network operation have to be efficiently controlled.
The BPM project 'SIP' (SBB Infrastructure Portal) automates incident processes with a workflow system. In the project, one unified BPM system was used for very diverse process management and we would like to emphasize how we managed complexity. Imagine a tree that has fallen on a railway track. It damages rails, power lines and even telecom wires. A complex mixture of processes and organizations (civil engineering, power services, IT, external companies) has to be mastered by different technical control centers in order to efficiently react to the incident and finally make the joint decision to give the green light once all impediments have been resolved.

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, USA

Nominated by Living Systems Technologies, USA

This case study details the experience of transforming a highly political, overburdened and mostly manual governmental claims processing system into a highly efficient and effective system via the application of world-class solution architecture and information technologies products. It examines the direct benefits of following a structured approach that effectively decomposes the business layer into a collection of requirements backed by BPMN 2.0 process models, followed by the subsequent composition of the solution through the application and technology layers.
An emphasis on correctly positioning layered architecture principles is crucial to the formation and evaluation of an appropriate solution architecture. Of particular importance, once a layered architectural perspective is adopted, it becomes possible to cleanly abstract a process layer, whose functionality can be fulfilled via model-driven execution. 

Vitens, the Netherlands

Nominated by You-Get, the Netherlands

With over 5M customers, Vitens is the largest water company of the Netherlands, with the goal to be the best service provider of the Netherlands and additionally have the lowest integral costs per connection. The Customers department of Vitens, responsible for all communication (including invoicing and collection) realized that the key in achieving this lies in more efficient and effective business processes followed the BPM Maturity Model steps, in combination with proven Best Practices.
The starting point has been the business processes documentation and optimization, followed by a BPMSuite automation project and completed with an organization structure adjustment. First the organization is made process aware, then (to secure the proactive and continuous improvement of the processes) Process Improvement teams and a BPM CoE (Center of Excellence) has been set up, including defined KPIs.
Vitens now has a flexible and efficient matrix organization, with real-time process monitoring and continuously visible process performance, and is working towards all end-to-end processes being visible, in control and continuously improving.

P.S. Not sure yet if Passports to Success is right for you? 

Check for yourself!

Download this complete 34-page special Mini-Book featuring the award-winning case study by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs detailing how they used to BPM to ensure that US Veterans and their families would always enjoy uninterrupted benefits.

Click here for Veterans Affairs mini-book (no sign-up required)

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How to win an Award and be published in our next book... The annual WfMC Awards for Global Excellence in BPM are sponsored by WfMC.org and BPM.com. General information and guidelines for submissions are at www.bpmf.org.