The Alarming State of Traditional BPMS
It's no secret that productivity is the key to successful business. More and more companies nowadays are turning to automating process management to facilitate business growth, increase productivity and reduce costs. They pay close attention to the business process management (BPM) concept—a systematic approach to making an organization's workflow more efficient and improving business performance outcomes and operational agility.
Being very powerful, traditional BPM systems (BPMS) are quite expensive to implement and difficult to use. BPMS projects require big investments, long learning cycles, as well as dedicated professionals involved.
Important is the factor of ever-changing environment of business—being adaptive to changes is vital for efficient business process management in enterprises. Though a traditional BPMS is usually a solid and reliable product, being adaptive to unpredictable cases is its Achilles' heel.
Last but not least is the significance of the human factor which is in many cases underestimated. Poor adoption of the new standards can affect the success of the whole BPMS project. Research in this study explores these issues in detail and identifies the respective business impact, without the required skills for the qualified work.
A traditional BPM system is complicated to implement and use. Most BPM systems are expensive and require a long implementation process. In a survey conducted by MIT Sloan, respondents highlight that senior leaders seem to be paralyzed by business systems that will take a good deal of effort and cash to change/adapt.
Learning a BPMS is also challenging. Traditional software for business process management is not easy enough to be mastered during a couple of hours of training. As a result, the training time either becomes too long, or the employees have to work in a new system without the required skills for the qualified work.
Business impact: Implementation of most traditional BPM systems can require months of work. Long training requirements hinder work and decrease productivity.
Traditional BPMS is not adaptive to unpredictable cases. The users of traditional BPM systems face the serious problem of "cemented processes"—the processes are hard-coded, and the process changes together with the BPM system enhancements can easily cost millions of dollars and years of work.
The story of an insurance company who had purchased a solution off the shelf shows the result of using the traditional BPM system. Over the years the company had customized the package to meet its needs. After years of enhancements costing tens of millions of dollars, the organization was faced with a product that was so highly customized that it could not be upgraded and was out of support, but still did not meet current or future requirements.
Business impact: Implementation of the BPM system is a pain in the neck for all stakeholders. End users cannot solve problems in process modeling, nor can they re-model the processes themselves in real-time.
Traditional BPMS is dependent on the human factor. Success of BPMS implementation also depends on the human factors; such projects need experienced and skilled professionals, as well as organizational and individual acceptance of the changes.
Poor adoption is one of the main barriers to unsatisfactory results of BPMS implementation. First, people do not understand how it will solve the problems they face in their everyday work. Second, a BPM system that is too hard to master leads to low work motivation. Finally, people lose interest, especially if the BPMS implementation takes too long. It all builds a negative attitude to the whole BPMS project.
The role of IT is a disputable question, too. Some suppose BPMS implementation to be an IT matter, some think that mostly business process specialists, or, sometimes even finance, are in charge of such projects. Research by Capgemini shows that there can be resistance from IT staff who have responsibility for existing systems in the company.
Business impact: Poor adoption and miscommunication can lead to BPMS project failure and lost money. Negative attitude to BPMS implementation influences the implementation results.
Best Practices
The successful implementation of a BPMS project is estimated in terms of enabled business processes, increased productivity and reduced costs. The BPM system should serve the operational excellence, but at the same time be flexible and efficient. This is not an easy goal to achieve. BPMS implementation results show there are still a lot of pitfalls to avoid, and the choice of BPM system should be made very carefully.
Many experts see an ideal BPM system as the one solving the above mentioned problems and being able to:
- Help avoid costly and long-term redeployment procedures;
- Enable business processes without IT specialists involvement; and
- Eliminate time-consuming training and learning.
Comindware Solution
Based on identified best practices, Comindware developed a breakthrough software solution Comindware Tracker that combines the simplicity of implementation and use, as well as the ability to adapt to unpredictable cases.
While delivering the most frequently used business process management concepts, Comindware Tracker offers a number of unique benefits:
- Supports unpredictable business processes;
- Flexible to adapt to your processes, not the other way around;
- Processes can be updated as and when required without any redeployment process; and
- Visual drag-and-drop workflow builder. No programming required.
About Comindware
Comindware is a fast-growing, global software company delivering innovative solutions that enable businesses to operate more efficiently and effectively.
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