BPM for Mid-Sized Businesses? Yes!
BPM for Mid-Sized Businesses? Yes!
BPM for Mid-Sized Businesses? Yes!
Over the last several years, much has been written about the effect that business process management (BPM) can have on a company’s insight into their business, ability to respond to change, and ultimately control over their future. While few people would argue that large companies can benefit from BPM deployment, many still question whether mid-sized businesses can get the same kind of benefits at a price they can manage.
At QAT Global, we would argue that BPM is just as important for mid-sized businesses as it is for their larger counterparts. BPM is about improving efficiency, compliance, and agility while reducing risks. For mid-sized businesses, this translates into supporting growth and enabling a smoother transition from a medium to large operation. Without question, the judicial use of BPM can create a strategic competitive advantage for any mid-size business.
The Need for BPM in Mid-Sized Companies
The goal of every BPM initiative is to continuously achieve better business resource optimization through improved processes, create a strong bridge between business goals and IT solutions, and better control organizational costs and cycle times. The ultimate benefit of BPM is to gain transparency into the business so management can make smarter and more profitable business decisions and have the agility they need to respond to ever-changing business conditions and customer demands.
Like any other size of business, mid-sized companies need to improve both their top and bottom-line performance. However, they are typically hindered by resource and time constraints. In addition, they tend to have fewer internal systems and processes to act as checks and balances on decision-making throughout the business. With these combined factors, the ROI is clear for smart BPM implementation within mid-sized companies.
Resource constraints make achieving better business resource optimization through improved processes all the more critical. Relying on paper forms, email and spreadsheets for process management makes it nearly impossible to achieve the continuous maximization of resource use and streamlining of processes that is needed to achieve the level of efficiency required for growth. Resources waste valuable time on non-value-added tasks such as formatting reports, distributing information, consolidating data, and managing the communication process instead of spending the majority of their time producing value for customers. Plus, managers are forced to make decisions without timely and accurate information and the much-needed internal checks and balances present in large companies, and thus their decisions have a rapid and significant impact on their success or failure. Clearly, the timely and accurate insight into the business that BPM can help to provide would go far in improving the decision-making process for mid-sized company managers.
Mid-sized companies must also be agile; since they don’t have the scale of resources a large corporation has, they must rely on their ability to make fast decisions as a competitive advantage. The business landscape is ever-changing due to evolving customer demands, competition, product lines, and market segments. Combine this endless state of change with capital limitations, and it is clearly evident that mid-sized businesses are under constant pressure to continuously adapt in order to stay competitive. BPM delivers this much-needed insight and agility.
When you get right down to it though, mid-sized businesses stand to benefit the most from the three following benefits of BPM:
- Growth. BPM helps mid-sized businesses grow by improving their ability to handle increasing volumes of repeatable processes such as customer purchases, internal trouble tickets, new hires, and other business-specific processes.
- Compliance. The per-capita cost of compliance with government regulations in a mid-sized business tends to be much greater than that of a larger one even though they are both subject to the same rules, and face similar consequences if they don’t comply. BPM can offer the automation, control, approval and auditing necessary to meet these regulatory demands.
- ROI. Today, full-featured, sophisticated BPM solutions, such as Agility BPM are available at a price that’s manageable for mid-sized businesses. Plus, deployment can be done quickly and at a very reasonable cost.
In conclusion, while BPM solutions certainly empower large enterprises and the need is clear, it is really the mid-sized business that stands to benefit the most.
