Study finds executive-level interest in BPM lacking

Business process management (BPM) is a topic of great interest in the corporate world, but apparently not as great a concern as it should be to the occupants of executive suites. That was the general conclusion of a study titled The State of Business Process Management, published by the BPMInstitute, Northboro, Mass.

Conclusions were based on a survey issued to 400 attendees at a conference sponsored by BPMInstitute last April. The study suggests that the level of executive interest in BPM within a company can be measured by whether the company has a formal business process organization (BPO) driven by executive management.

While 67 percent of survey respondents say their companies have a formal BPO, only 19 percent say those organizations are driven by executives. Additionally, 40 percent say the IT department drives their BPOs, while 8 percent identified line-of-business managers as the driving force.

"BPOs driven by IT or line-of-business managers usually signify that the BPO is not yet recognized as a focus on an enterprise level and that the company is investing in BPM as a solution to a departmental or limited cross-functional process improvement," the study says. It also points out that companies that have applied enterprisewide BPM strategies to core functions—such as supply chain, demand chain, and product development operations—have realized the following benefits:

• 50-percent reduction in product design time;
• 80-percent reduction in order processing time; and
• 60-percent improvement in call-center efficiency.

View more about the study at www.BPMInstitute.org.