I see BPM technology has providing a necessary glue between humans and computers in business processes. Oh sure, we have software which people use directly but BPM works in the space between applications. It works in the “hand-off” space. It’s the place where work goes when it isn’t being done in one application or the next one in the process chain. It’s the “inbox”. it’s the “call queue”. It’s the empty space where productivity is lost.
Do you know how much time your core business processes are losing because forms, data, requests, etc. are sitting in wait? Just to give you some context, that core business process could be “Order-to-Cash”. That is, from the time the order is placed, transmitted to order capture, a request to inventory is sent, product delivered, invoice sent, payment received, etc. etc. etc.
I don’t always emphasize this in my posts but BPM software is business “group productivity” software. That is to say, it makes it possible to measure and improve the productivity of a cross-functional group of people in real-time. It is certainly complementary to a Lean/Six Sigma effort.
While we always say you can’t improve what you don’t measure, strictly speaking, you won’t know what you gained if you didn’t measure. A BPM system allows you to perform that measurement while you operate.
In a small business, it is generally easier to identify the process problems because they tend to be more linear. But in medium and large businesses, those processes can become tangled quickly.
There’s a concept I read about in a book about IBM that makes a lot of sense - they call it “empty box time”. That is, how long would it take your company to ship an empty box? What is the overhead of all the bureaucracy, forms, stamps, approvals, and other red tape?
Read up on Six Sigma, “walk” the forms in your business, count the steps, and get a feel for what your empty box time is.
With the introduction of cheap/free BPM software (like Nova Bonita), we are starting to get the tools to introduce gradual automation into business with minimal disruption, laying the foundation for gradual improvement.