Posts Tagged ‘savings’
20% Savings! Really?
Originally posted on 7/15/09.
Recently, I read an article by Gartner with a title referring to a 20% cost savings in the first year after a BPM project. Being in the BPM consulting business, I was delighted with the title alone and have included a version of the article provided by ebizQ in the Files section on my Resources page. It can also be found on the ebizQ site at http://www.ebizq.net/news/11095.html?rss . If you’re a Gartner Group client you should check out their article directly at www.garter.com . I’m sure it will be more detailed. Obviously, one of Gartner’s motivations for publishing this information so that it’s available to folks who are not Gartner customers was to drive interest in one of their BPM summits. That’s not a problem for me if the information is useful and accurate. I do think this information is useful and accurate. By no means do I think that those savings claims will be true for everyone. I do think that the pursuit of improving BPM for any company will lead to impressive results. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be investing in a business to help clients get there.
I do differ on one of their points. The article states that organizations which adopt BPM without establishing a business process competency center find their efforts don’t deliver the promised results. I ran manufacturing organizations, process technology organizations and IT organizations for many years. Based on firsthand experience and observation in the real manufacturing world I believe that BPM has to be at the core of the manufacturing or service organizations to be sustainable, not in an external group. Sustainability is the key. I believe that the client is best served if, instead, they have what I call a Business Process Architect. That should be a person on the client’s succession plan to be the COO and have significant leverage or ownership in the company’s operations (service or manufacturing) organizations. That person doesn’t need a competency center.
Other than that one point, I think this article has merit. Consistent with this article, our SLR methodology strives to institutionalize a continuous improvement mindset broken down in to two distinct parts. First, the step change component which is the combination of RUP and Lean approaches and an ongoing Six Sigma type continuous improvement component. Both become must a part of the corporate culture and be sustained. This ends the overt StrAIT Advisors pitch for this post.
I believe that most of the points made in this article are worthwhile so Gartner gets gold stars from me. I hope you found this post to be valuable. See you next time…
