The Costs and Benefits of Business Process Management

One of the most difficult management measurements is calculating the cost of not taking action. Businesses are constantly looking for process and cost efficiencies, which increasingly means leveraging the latest technologies to build (or maintain) a competitive advantage. But few organizations strive to understand the costs (and benefits) of making changes to your business systems,

A recent study conducted by Computerworld Magazine and WEBCON provides some pertinent data points on the impacts of change, and of implementing business process management solutions. The free report (no registration required) provides an overview of the change management and business process automation efforts of 125 IT directors across a dozen different industries, including manufacturing, public sector, and financial services, who provided valuable detail about their challenges of managing business processes and change within their organizations — and of implementing a BPM solution.

Forty-one percent of those surveyed recognized that they had overly complex corporate business processes, with 34% indicating significant gaps in competencies and human resources. One-third of respondents also mentioned issues related to information silos within the company.

“As business processes are constantly evolving, the key factor is how easily the IT department is able to handle the change of requirements – both those in the stage of implementation (so they do not become the reason for perpetual delaying of the production start), and (or perhaps predominantly) those which appear after the magical ‘go live’ – so the lack of possibility of quick introduction of changes does not become a roadblock stopping the growth of the business.”

Lucasz Wrobel, VP and Chief Business Development Officer at WEBCON 

While less than half of survey respondents (36%) indicated that they currently use BPM solutions, the majority recognized that these solutions could provide sizeable improvements to functioning processes within critical areas of their businesses while also reducing operating costs. My interpretation of this data is that companies are so focused on current operations that they often fail to properly investigate the cost benefits of change.

To read more about these survey results and analysis, download your free copy of the report today (Managing Change and Business Processes in Organizations).