Business process management provides fast payback, says survey

Half of organisations using business process management (BPM) tools achieve a payback in 18 months or less—and fully 72% are there within two years. That's among top findings of a survey by AIIM, which also reveals that, once the tools are in place and understood, further projects take an average of eight months to complete. In addition to cost savings, users also report faster process throughput and improved compliance from more consistent processes. What's more, a majority of respondents feel they have only addressed one-fifth of the potentially profitable BPM projects, and consider BPM to be "'significant' or 'imperative'. Doug Miles, director of market intelligence for AIIM, says that the survey shows a wide range of processes to which BPM has been successfully applied. "Accounts payable is a popular application, scanning incoming invoices and matching them in the finance system. The survey also showed good results in customer support, proposal generation and a number of HR processes," he says. "The biggest technical issue restricting growth is integration with other enterprise systems, although increasing use of service oriented architectures (SOA) can make this much easier. We also found that most organisations don't fully understand their current processes – or cannot agree what they are. This makes mapping and optimising difficult," adds Miles. BPM has mixed origins in scanned document workflow and enterprise application integration. As a result, IT departments are likely to initiate BPM projects in a third of companies, whereas business managers take the lead in the next third. Miles says that the survey confirms identifying an end-to-end process owner is one of the most important aspects of successful project management.