Create a Process Driven Enterprise

‘Templatize’ for Better Business Process Management (BPM)

If there’s a word I’d like to mainstream, It would certainly be templatize. It’s already
used in the computing world, but I think it has a broader application when it comes
to business processes too. It’s a wonderful synthesis of our digital world’s move toward customization and automation, and it simply makes sense for those of us who spend our
days Googling and WhatsApping. The business template allows us to create our own
processes once and then repeat them over and over again, tweaking and refining along
the way.

Templatizing is an essential part of any company’s business process management, or
BPM. What is BPM? It’s simply the optimizing of your business practices, looking for
ways where you can cut costs, increase revenue, increase efficiency and productivity,
and just make things easier and clearer for your team.

Better BPM is a constant struggle and reward situation for businesses of all shapes
and sizes, whether you’re just at a couple desks in your local coworking center or
in a multinational distributed team. It’s the part that doesn’t focus on what you’re
doing so much as how you do it all. Logically, BPM and workflow templates go
hand-in-hand.
 

What are the benefits of business templates?

A business template is a BPM tool that acts like a workflow diagram that lets you
map out a repeatable process.

1. Templatizing enables ‘hit-by-a-truck’ teamwork

If something unfortunate happened to the most essential member of your team
(or if they simply left your team), would your business fall apart? Business templates
clarify workflow processes and make it easier to run a “hit-by-a-truck” operation that
allows for people to move between teams and roles without disruption. They also let
you run an international business from anywhere and allow remote teams to
collaborate on clearly defined tasks.

2. Templatizing captures the efficiency of best practices

We’re all working toward constant cycles of innovation and improvement, but why
reinvent the wheel? It takes up time and energy that we could be putting into new
mission-critical initiatives. Once you know what’s working for you, allow business
templates to drive repeatable best practices, and then look to experiment in other
parts of your work.

3. Templatizing gets you started

Business templates are simple and elegant BPM and productivity tools. Once you create
them, you can reuse-recycle and dive in to get started right away on any new project.
An added benefit: starting faster also minimizes procrastination and increases your
chances of completing the task at hand.

4. Templatizing reduces errors

Let’s face it, nobody’s perfect. You need to work as a team to create tried-and-true
workflows. By having repeatable steps to follow, you make sure that everyone follows
the same crucial steps, limiting mistakes made and creating a transparent workflow that
teammates around the world can view and follow.

5. Templatizing improves consistency and accountability

Using a template as part of your business process management workflow means that
you and your team are focused on clarity, conciseness, and consistency. It means you
have your you-know-what together. Not only does it help onboard new team members,
it helps give current members assurance that they heading in the right direction. And
this form of workflow automation also helps shine light on the all-important question of whodid what, when.
 

Where can you use templates in your day-to-day
BPM?

There are a lot of places where templatizing is a no-brainer. First and foremost, creating
a repeatable workflow helps increase customer satisfaction. Try using it for tech support
and customer success to follow a common flow of how to help resolve customer issues,
or to help close a deal.

And you can make sure that no matter who answers the phone or accesses the lead that you
get the right information from the start with a systematized client intake
workflow template:

For me, being part of the small 100-percent remote team that runs the online remote
network Happy Melly, the first use case we saw for templates in our highly experimental
org was for onboarding.

When you go from from three to 15 teammates and from about 60 to 400 clients in just
a year, you have to change the way you do business — or you’re sure to miss important
steps in welcoming any new member of your extended work family.

For example, here’s a snapshot of a customizable Redbooth workflow template for
onboarding new team members:

Browse Our Free Workflow Templates

Use our free workflow templates to follow a typical workflow for any given task, or go ahead and customize them to make them your own:

• Design a website
• Set up a Scrum workflow
• Manage project status
• Plan a big event
• Run a weekly meeting

…and many more!

And while templates and defined BPM may seem corporate, they also help startups and up-and-comers too.

In fact, at Redbooth, they first got the idea for creating the workflow templates going through their own Series B funding round, creating a series of legal templates to get them through that arduous yet essential investor paperwork.

But then they couldn’t stop. Now, with just a click of a button, you can open up a new Redbooth workspace that has all the steps laid out for you in common workflow management. Open up a workflow template in your existing Redbooth account, or start a free trial and test-drive as many templates as you want.

There are dozens of workflow templates already, and Redbooth is always interested in ideas for creating more! Email workflow@redbooth.com to find out more about getting custom workflow templates
 created for your business processes.

Explore the Redbooth Workflow Template library >>

BEST PRACTICESPRODUCTIVITYWORKFLOW TEMPLATES

SOURCE: Redbooth

Benefits of Integrating Business Process Management with Lean Six Sigma

Business Process Management and Lean Six Sigma can work very well together. Each system has something great to contribute to an organization, which results in a higher level of power when combined. However, today not all organizations throughout the world either recognize the benefits or have failed to implement the combined initiatives through a system such as Integrated Enterprise Excellence.

In Lean Six Sigma, members and leaders are typically taught that technology is not a vital component in terms of solving process problems. Although BPM involves technology, Lean Six sigma can be enhanced through BPM’s methodologies and capabilities. Similarly, BPM users tend not to have appreciation of Lean Six Sigma strategies and how the techniques of Lean Six Sigma could lead to more effective BPM deployments. BPM and Lean Six Sigma complement each other in many ways possible, but not many are aware about these. Five benefits of integrating these two initiatives are:

1. Process Enforcement and Business Ownership

The integration of BPM and Lean Six Sigma can speed up the real-time execution of processes even when a team is geographically dispersed. With the tools combined, organizations or businesses can offer an orchestration of the essential elements of the techniques, such as the processes, inputs, outputs, failure analysis, documentation, evaluation, statistical analysis and feedback, among others. An effective collaboration of BPM and Lean Six Sigma can result in processes that can be automatically executed through BPM?s automation.

Through this integration, practitioners or business owners can have more control, which is intensified by monitoring and the reporting of predictive process performance metrics. The BPM portion and associated software can provide vital data for implementation and process design. This simply means that all processes can be executed according to their intent with harmony. This minimizes the risks of problems occurring.

2. Agility and Speed

Organizations will experience benefits when the two initiatives (i.e., agility and speed) operate together. For instance, a supplier can improve its competitiveness by reducing the delivery time. Through the use of Lean Six Sigma methods, this organization can determine the value stream map, which highlights the metrics and focus points necessary to reduce total lead time.

In this, the value stream map is broken down from the lower processes up to the point that key areas of waste and failure are addressed. Once improved, it results in delivery time enhancements. A BPM automation initiative can act at this time to deploy the controls and processes throughout the initial key areas, such as waiting order approvals and signatures. Through BPM, there can be automated controls, where all the data for process performance are collected in real time.

3. Better Approach to Problem Solving

Usually, Lean Six Sigma strategies focus on resolving narrow and highly specific issues. With this technique, all the data necessary to eradicate all wasted work can be determined in an efficient manner. Hence, there can be a well-defined set of steps or activities, which will aid in eliminating all the non-value-added work.

However, a traditional Lean Six Sigma deployment by itself often misses the big picture. This is where Business Process Management can be beneficial in the picture. In general, organizations benefit the most when there is a framework that will support the integration of the two techniques so that all angles of the problem solving process will be looked in a more precise manner; e.g., the Integrated Enterprise Excellence business management system described above.

4. Patches the Weaknesses

Lean Six Sigma alone in terms of a deployment involves two major weak points:

• The enhancements obtained from Lean Six Sigma have the tendency to become isolated and less focused, which can lead to problems with the flow of services or products in terms of the bigger context, like in an enterprise.
• A Lean Six Sigma deployment depends upon the collection of resources from competitors and views priorities the same way cooperatives do. Since various business units have their unique priority ratings, reviewing the right priorities normally leads to slow enterprise-wide improvements.

Now, what about BPM? Essentially, BPM is not into statistics — creation of hypothesis test when it comes to identifying areas for improvements like a Lean Six Sigma process improvement roadmap suggests. Yet, BPM within an IEE structure lays the framework required for modification in workflows and processes to allow the implementation of enhanced outputs derived from Lean Six Sigma.

5. Higher Returns

Average companies, which either employ Lean Six Sigma or BPM, are known to generate increased profit when compared to those who do not utilize any initiative. However, those organizations that manage to effectively integrate BPM and Lean Six Sigma successfully achieve the most long-lasting benefits.

Many organizations are deploying both Lean Six Sigma and BPM. Most of these companies are large companies, but smaller ones can also reap the benefits of BPM and Lean Six Sigma, together. Those companies that either utilizes Six Sigma, BPM or both experienced significant improvements on essential performance indicators. Yet, those who performed the integration of the two initiatives gained higher levels of success, particularly in terms of revenues.

Without doubt, the two initiatives have a lot to give to one another since they only have one goal — help organizations optimize and manage their processes more efficiently. While the focus and approach may be different, the combined efforts really help in elimination of waste, improving quality and developing better control.

BPM and Lean Six Sigma integration is promising, but organizations should be clever and alert to achieve continuous improvement throughout the years to come. An Integrated Enterprise Excellence system provides a roadmap for this effective integration.

SOURCE: Quality Magazine

Are Your Operations Doing the Right Things, at the Right Time, in the Right Way?

Companies have focused on efficiency for over 15 years now.  But are they making the processes effective?

For this column, let’s consider efficiency to be doing work as quickly as possible with a low error rate.  Then let’s consider effectiveness as eliminating all work that is not really necessary – doing the right things, at the right time, and in the right way.

Too many BPM efforts however, are so narrowly focused on cost takeout that they miss the fundamental question of need – “do we need to do this in the first place?”  Of course, the answer to this question must be backed by the answer to the question “why?”  Anything that falls outside of this need is extra and is a candidate for elimination.  

Not surprisingly, doing this before the team considers efficiency will save a lot of time and cost.  Why improve things you don’t need to do?  But it will also leave holes that will need to be removed.

Effectiveness

Efficiency lives in process – no real news there.  But where does effectiveness live?

I submit that effectiveness lives in fundamental “need”.  What do you really need to do?  The framework for identifying this “need” and thus effectiveness is set by the company’s strategy and given context in the company operating model.  Anything beyond this fundamental or basic need in producing the service or product is extra.   What is left will require specialized support activities to knit together – but that can be managed through careful action and task justification.

So we can find what we need to do to be effective, and we can then make that efficient.  But before we make anything efficient we need to first look at how we can guide work so that the right answers, components, business operations, and assemblies come together to deliver the service or product component.  We need to find a way that guarantees the right logic is considered and the right questions are asked to comply with legislative and operational requirements while constantly being guided to the next step in the work.  

This requirement for guidance is the realm of business, manufacturing, technical, and other rules.  The fact is that rules define the “what” of the business - while process defines the “how”.  If we consider process to be the life blood of the company, carrying the components that are needed to produce something and thus keep the company operating, we can consider rules to be the “brains of the outfit”.  They direct everything and tell us how things need to be done.  Rules thus set the operating framework and are both interpreted and supported by standards to set performance measurement limits on the work.  Taken together, rules and their supporting standards, define how operational effectiveness will be viewed – within the context of company strategy.

Finding rules

Rules are everywhere.  Most are, however, not written and those that are, are seldom up to date.  So where do you start?  The following is one approach – it is not the only one however.  But, it works.  Let’s start with effectiveness in any process, business unit’s work flow, or the applications that support the work.

The first step is the archeological dig through the company dustbins – existing documentation.  Procedure manuals, HR rules, financial rules, sales rules, and compliance rules should be collected and the rules vetted.  That is the foundation – you may very well find rule conflicts, out of date rules, and rules that no one knew existed.  Vetting them is tedious and will probably be resisted.  But it is critical and needs to be done to create a foundation for the operation
.  
These rule collections will first focus on the business operation.  IT should next add its technology related rules – the Do’s and Don’ts that must be considered in any business activity support design.  To make this collection useful, care will need to be taken in finding a rules “engine” or storage application, coding the rules for electronic storage, and defining an indexing structure that will make it easy to find and thus modify, version, or reuse any rule.

With this foundation in place, it will be time to look at the business operation itself.

Any look at what makes a company effective must really start with strategy outcome and work backward.  The outcome description is where you first know how goals will be delivered and where the business model must be changed to support the strategy.  All capabilities will be identified and defined as part of the outcome definition. The capabilities then tie to process and a walk back up the process is a look at what it takes to build the product or services.  

The activity in a business unit represents the work that actually creates the components and does the construction of a solution.  The rules in the company guide every action, every decision, and every step of the work.  But when many teams look at a BPM project, they focus on the activity, not the rules that help identify if the activity is even needed – if the activity is not important or complex enough to require guidance the team really must ask why it exists. Similarly, if the rules do not support the actual work, why do they exist?  The two are partners in a corporate dance that determines what should be done and how it should be done.
Of course, if the rules are overly complex, the team will need to see if they can be streamlined.

In addition to the “easy to find” rules, teams will find other rules (often the most important ones) in the heads of the staff.  They do the work and apply rules constantly – some they make up to control new work.  Many of these unwritten rules are not found anywhere in the “documented” and now vetted rules.  In some cases, these rules may be imbedded in applications that the staff has learned about over time through use.  In other cases, the rules are work-around rules that have had to be informally created to get past changes in the operation, in law, and in application systems.  I call these “white space” rules.  Only the people doing the work of getting around things know these rules. 

The fact is that these rules will tell the team how the activity really works.  Comparing these rules with the ones you have already documented will point out redundancy, differences, conflicts, and erroneous activity.  In some cases I have found old rules that no one knew were still in use had to be changed immediately to comply with current legal requirements.

Rules
As noted rules are everywhere and at many times are the hidden mandate for any activity.

But today we see that many from the BPM world do not pay enough attention to business rules and many from the BPMS world look at rules from a technical perspective – aligning them to the applications in the project or solution.  In both cases, these rules are generally poorly defined and unavailable for general use.  They are also not really adequately shared between the business and IT sides in creating a new business solution.

The need to address this is critical and cannot be underemphasized – you must get a handle on your company’s business, technical, production, customer, compliance, and financial rules.  In healthcare, there are even more rule categories on the clinical side of services.  Without a detailed understanding of applicable rules and immediate access to them, it is difficult to look at change and anticipate impact.  

However, what we should do with rules is a matter of opinion.  The same is true in determining what we need to do.  The fact is that both considerations are often debatable.  Today, I find that rules are often one of the orphans of the modern IT and business operation activities.  Both IT and the business seem to have divided business transformation and IT solution development and in many ways are recreating the divide of the past 50 years.

The problem is that many teams really don’t look closely into the rules in a business or IT operation and ask the probing fundamental questions.  These include:

1.    Is the procedure manual up to date?  How can we bring it up to date?
2.    Do we really know all the rules that guide the work or the creation of IT support?
3.    Are the company rules written down?  Have they been reviewed by business area managers?
4.    Has legal and finance reviewed the rules and vetted them?
5.    Are the rules stored in a rules library?  How are the rules organized?  Are they linked to business activity and are they easy to find in the rules library?
6.    Do we know every place in the business and every application that uses each rule?
7.    Are all compliance related rules defined and aligned to the business activity work? – Are we in compliance with all important state, federal, and international (for the countries we do business with) rules?
8.    Have we been fined for reporting violations in the past?  What did we do about that?

Why is this important?
Compliance, HR, legal, and financial rules represent laws and require that you follow them or risk being fined and maybe go out of business.  Other rules determine how things will be done and provide order out of what would be operational chaos.  The fact is that rules are the logic of the company and project the beliefs and culture that executive management wants to infuse into the workforce.

In the context of this column, rules direct how all work is done and how all decisions are made.  They provide the framework for business activity and they guide workers and managers down a specific path in interacting with customers, building product, and running the business.

The simple fact is that without rules, even if they are not written, everyone in any business would be able to do their work in whatever way they thought right.  Chaos would reign and the company could not compete.  So why are rules important?  They simply guide all work and compliance with appropriate laws.  They keep you in business.

So who owns rules?

Who is responsible for finding them, defining them, and then both managing them and changes to them?  Not a small task.  There are thousands of rules in any mid-sized company and a lot more in a large company.  There are, however, no standards or norms for rule ownership that I am aware of.

There is also seldom anyone who has the authority to, or the responsibility to, collect, vet, index, and store rules.  This is one of the big problems that hampers effective and efficient business operation and slows any type of business improvement or transformation.

But the fact that there are rules everywhere and that there are business activity rules, decision rules, compliance rules, HR rules, finance rules, legal rules, social rules, policy rules, technology rules, data rules and on and on, makes finding, updating, and controlling their use a difficult task.  So who is responsible for rules?  This takes commitment from a person like the COO or the CIO and it must be considered to be a strategic necessity.  If not, it will not be funded.
The fact is that rules are a company asset!  

Rules allow the company to run with some consistency and efficiency – they help make certain work get done the right way.  They support strategy and compliance with laws.  They are the combined intelligent evolution of the company and how it works – gathered over all the years that the company has been in business.  They are one of the big things that provide any company with a competitive edge.

The fact is that whoever can change the fastest with the lowest risk will have a real advantage.  Those who can include access to all relevant information for these rapid changes will have an even greater advantage.  Arguably an advantage that combines rapid improvements to both effectiveness and efficiency offers a timing and cost of change advantage, and builds flexibility into the operation.

Because a company’s rules define and support this competitive differentiation, they should be considered to be undiscovered company assets.  Many will represent trade secrets and some may be based on patents and proprietary thought leadership.  All of which are company assets.

Formal rule definitions are also important in operations and business interruption – Disaster and Recovery.  If they are not known and if known but not formal, a remote hot site for Disaster Recovery is not really much use in many companies.  The computers will work in the hot site, but operations will be hurt.

Note:  A Disaster Recovery hot site is a remote location that has fully operational computers and work space running 365 days a year.

A looming catastrophe

Companies are about to lose many of their senior workers due to aging.  Without a clearly defined set of integrated rules that can be easily found we can expect the millennials who replace these workers to make procedure and execution errors – the infamous human errors that people are writing about. It is easy to predict serious competitive problems for companies that do not take the time or make the investment to create this foundation for understanding the business and how it functions.  This is not only a business problem.  It is also an IT problem, a manufacturing problem, and a problem in every corner of the business.

Tight budgets have caused cutbacks in the way BPM and BPMS groups look at creating solutions and in the move to integrating components into end to end processes for modernization.  But the market is opening and competition is heating up.  Given the changes in technology, business management, and the approaches to business streamlining, it is clear that some will leverage this emerging technology and some will not.  However, for those that do, change will have removed a major anchor that is slowing the company’s ability to adjust and evolve.  

The purpose of this column is to encourage BPM practitioners to increase their emphasis on identifying and defining business rules and in applying the understanding this discovery process will provide to looking at what rules and work are really necessary to start with.  From that point the traditional look at efficiency can provide even better results.

SOURCE: processexcellencenetwork

Business Process Management System Service Quality

Business Process Management System Service Quality applies to many types of businesses.  In this blog, I will use a hospital to illustrate application of the methodology.

In running a hospital, patient’s treatment is not the only point listed as highly important, but also the hospital service quality. Just like other businesses in common, a client’s or customer’s satisfaction is the most important thing and the only way to achieve this goal is by providing ‘humanist’ medical treatment. Patients should not be considered a treatment object, but instead they should be considered also as subject of the treatment.

Business Process Management System Service Quality Roadmap

There are benefits to both hospitals and patients from a business process management (BPM) implementation. Business process management system service quality has benefits are commonly grouped to have both technical and non-technical benefits.  This blog will give focus to five non-technical steps for a BPM implementation in a hospital, where a similar thought process can be applied in other industries.  More detailed aspects for implementing business process management can be found:

• Business Process      Management Execution Roadmap
• Business Process      Management Book

Business Process Management System Service Quality Roadmap

The first step of a five-step process in implementing business process management system service quality is choosing a clear objective for the hospital’s implementation and its timescale. A clear objective will help the hospital in building a direction for their efforts. In selecting this objective, hospitals should consider creating an Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) value chain that has links processes with predictive scorecards.

Business Management System Service Quality Feasibility Study

Next, you should perform a feasibility study. Just like other businesses in common, a feasibility study is required. Through this study, each agreed objectives, as well as projects, will be reviewed in detailed ways. Even though this step is very important, it is very important to remember that feasibility study always concern about business and profit aspect, without considering any human aspect, such as patient’s satisfaction.

After having the feasibility study done, now you will have complete details about your hospital business, especially its cost estimation. At this point, you should be aware that you need a business case for the hospital. Using software at this point may be helpful, but in most cases better results can be reached if you want to perform case studies about business investments made by other hospitals.

Business Process Management System Service Quality Feasibility Study

Business Process Management System Service Quality Control

Now, at this point, you should have for your business process management system service quality implementation at least agreed objectives, priorities, feasibility study result, budget, and results you got from study cases. Even though they look like promising enough for your hospital, you still should determine another thing. At this point, using all data you have, you should already have in your mind a complete business plot. You should have a clear idea about what you are going to do and people with whom you’re going to cooperate to achieve your goal. Once again, it you need to perform a regular control management including final objective identification and sharing among all stakeholders.

Hospital is a huge business, not only because of amount of money generated from the business, but also the amount of people working there. In most cases, you will find that you need more than one person for each project. Different people with different background, skills, experience, thoughts, and so forth are needed to implement business process management system service quality in a organizations.

There is always a possibility that you will not be able to reach your goals. That is why you always need to perform, once again, routine control management, not only to keep each project progress recorded, but also to keep each project runs on track. In some cases, as you may found during your study cases, there are some hospitals as well as other similar businesses which went into bankruptcy because they didn’t have clear control management over their business.

Business Process Management System Service Quality Control Management

An enhanced business process management system service quality approach is a means to address these issues, which provides better orchestration so the enterprise as a whole benefits.

SOURCE: Smarter Solutions

How the Cloud is Transforming Business Process Management

Business process management services (BPMS) is changing -- and for the better. A convergence of company demands and new pricing models is driving innovation in the nature of BPMS and how it is delivered. In short, we are seeing a marked rise in popularity of cloud-based business process management or "Business Process as a Service" (BPaaS).

What is driving this increased interest in BPaaS? To start, companies are evolving their demand from transactional support to transformational support. So rather than looking for simple replication of existing processes at a lower cost, companies are asking providers for transformational support through standardized best-in-class processes.

Many companies are also looking for technological support in addition to services. Most process innovations require supporting technology solutions. For instance, within accounts receivable, automated collections routing and processing, along with an increased ability to accommodate new payment methods, are becoming commonplace. Companies using BPMS are increasingly asking providers for these solutions rather than making capital investments to build these capabilities themselves.

In addition, we have seen an emergence of innovative pricing models that makes BPMS attractive to companies of all sizes. In the past, high transition costs have made the use of external service providers prohibitive for everyone but the large enterprise. Transitions have become much shorter and more cost effective, while pay-as-you-go pricing models with zero or low upfront infrastructure costs are opening doors for small and large companies alike.

What is BPaaS?

The cloud offers three basic service delivery models: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); Platform as a Service (PaaS); and Software as a Service (SaaS). Each model builds incrementally on the previous one, much like a stack.

Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) is the next layer of abstraction after SaaS. It builds on the stack by providing process and people expertise that enables part or all of a business process and makes it available through a pay-per-use model.

The benefits of BPaaS extend across industries and into companies of all sizes, creating opportunities for growth and expansion at all levels. Because it does not require a heavy upfront investment in new infrastructure, BPaaS can enable fast entry into new markets and smooth setup of operations in new geographies (e.g., BRICs), or upgrading of operations and systems across old ones.

One durable medical equipment manufacturer, for example, enhanced its entire reimbursement operation using a BPaaS solution. The provider assumed responsibility for end-to-end reimbursement operations, including document management, eligibility verification, pre-authorization, order intake, billing and sales operations support, collections, denial management and cash application. A traditional BPMS implementation would have required the company to bear significant capital expenditure and spend years on system overhaul prior to handing over the processes to the BPMS provider. Instead, the company implemented a BPaaS solution and was up and running in a matter of months.

In another example, a large bank leveraged a provider-enabled solution for its mortgage originations. The solution provided end-to-end support for mortgage origination, enabling interaction between the many players and parties involved in the transaction. The solution is now being enhanced with a comprehensive document management workflow process to streamline communications and significantly enhance the value of the solution.

To realize benefits from BPaaS, companies do not have to implement or replace their ERP systems with end-to-end solutions from a service provider. Point BPaaS solutions that enhance part of the process value chain can minimize cost in terms of investment and disruption to the existing system landscape. BPaaS allows either retooling of end-to-end processes or selected modular upgrades that avoid significant change management or investment.

A large manufacturing company reduced spend by about 16 percent through its use of e-sourcing tools in their indirect sourcing process. The service provider built a solution using the IASTA technology platform and experienced resources. The company reduced sourcing and negotiation cycle times, enhanced the user experience, lowered administrative costs for running auctions, and improved transparency in the bidding process and tracking of savings.

BPaaS is also a real consideration for companies facing structural change such as acquisitions, divestitures and new market entry. IT departments are increasingly considering dual ERP architectures in their systems landscape. They are questioning if the smaller acquisitions need to be integrated onto the ERP system, or if they can be standardized on a single platform that can interact seamlessly but is separate from the main ERP system. New market entry can also be a considerable drain on a company’s resources while adopting a BPaaS solution might be a lower cost, lower risk option overall.

A leading durable goods manufacturer was able to integrate three emerging market acquisitions and go operational in less than six months by leveraging a hosted finance platform with local resources and expertise from the provider. The provider was able to help the company navigate the regulatory requirements, adopt required operational changes, and bring trained staff, leaving the company’s resources more time to focus on market development.

Next Steps to BPaaS

Companies interested in BPaaS solutions should evaluate providers against the following criteria:

• Does the provider have deep operations-level functional expertise in the space it is serving?
• Is the provider committed to refining and improving upon practices as they evolve?
• Is the solution stable and scalable?

Every day, companies are discovering new benefits and capabilities of a BPaaS solution with limited disruption to existing operations. BPaaS enables greater end-to-end flexibility and effectiveness in an organization, providing options for improving processes today rather than waiting for a capital intensive system redesign project down the line. And BPaaS does not need to be an end-to-end transformation. It can be a set of selective improvements that generates the greatest payoff, maximizing benefits for the costs of change -- both in dollars and disruption.

SOURCE: BusinessFinance