BPM Benefits Add up to Big Business Dividends
by Amy Larsen DeCarlo

While Wall Street watchers and political pundits continue their debate over whether we’re officially in a recession or merely stumbling into a painful correction, most industries are already feeling the pinch. Flagging consumer confidence and sinking sales are pushing corporate executives in every vertical—from the airline industry to telecommunications—to cut current spending and dial down expansion plans. But even as organizations take magnifying glasses to their budgets looking for more line items to purge, there is one area companies can’t afford not to invest in: Business Process Management (BPM).

At its core, BPM gives companies the elements they need to continuously improve operational processes to become more responsive to market changes and more successful in lowering overhead. This flexibility, useful even in the rosiest economic times, is particularly vital in periods when organizations need to make sweeping changes rapidly in order to stay competitive. BPM becomes even more effective better when married to a services-oriented architecture (SOA), which supplies a development environment for swiftly creating and coordinating individual processes to support larger end-to-end operations.

BPM that leverages the IBM Smart TM SOA approach is becoming something of the gold standard for companies seeking to capitalize on change rather than capsize under its force. More than 2,500 IBM customers are already reaping the benefits of investing in BPM using the Smart SOA foundation, with even more firms taking a close look at how this approach can help them channel change to build market momentum.

So what distinguishes BPM built on the Smart SOA foundation from other BPM solutions? At the highest level, IBM’s solution has the product portfolio breadth and the vertical industry depth to craft a practical, role-based approach to making process improvements and automating change in the organization. This approach brings tangible benefits to line of business personnel as well as to IT organizations. IBM’s BPM Suite covers every aspect of continuous process improvement from modeling, development and reuse through integration and ongoing monitoring and management.

But IBM’s BPM solution extends far beyond products and the literally thousands of pre-built industry assets to include a vast partner ecosystem, extensive client training programs and consultative support supplied by more than 1,000 BPM specialists who help companies put both BPM technology and practices in place.

These elements, combined with IBM’s global presence, have elevated the company to a leadership position in the BPM space and continue to attract clients looking for quantifiable returns from BPM investments.

Many companies have realized substantial rewards in terms of cost savings, faster time to market and an overall improvement in competitive posture from BPM with Smart SOA initiatives. Consider the case of ING Insurance Asia. With subsidiaries operating in a dozen countries in Asia, ING Insurance Asia needed a cost-effective way to create and implement business processes across all these organizations to cut expenses, reduce underwriting mistakes and accelerate policy decisions. Tapping the IBM Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) models, the company created and deployed reusable business processes and applications that provide individual business units with the data they need to speed underwriting time and become more competitive in all the regions in which the company does business.

Other examples of businesses achieving dramatic returns on their BPM solution using Smart SOA approach abound:

• Foreign currency exchange specialist Travelex saw an 85 percent drop in the time needed to process customer foreign exchange transactions.
• People’s Bank improved response times by 400 percent, and along with it, their success rate at upselling and cross-selling products.
• Chinese retailer Yansha cut order lead time from more than two days to just four and a half hours, which produced a return on its BPM investment in just nine months.

These stories are testimony to the kind of dividends a business can achieve from leveraging BPM. The right tools and support are essential to a company’s evolution into a more agile enterprise that can turn market challenges into real competitive opportunities.

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