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Scenario: You’ve identified a business process that you think is costing more than it should or hindering production. You’ve come to the conclusion that BPM software will help solve this problem.
The next step is to determine which of the more than 100 companies who identify themselves as “BPM software vendors” can provide the optimal mix of features, benefits and support to your enterprise.
No matter where you turn for information about specific solutions and vendors, you will be most successful if you first understand the nature of your situation, and educate yourself about the complex product you are looking to buy.
Understanding the real-world ROI that other companies have realized, whether revenue benefits such as increasing the number of orders processed or cost benefits such as reducing cycle times, can help make or strengthen the case for your own BPM initiative. |
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Understand the nature of your requirement— the degree to which the processes you’re looking to manage are integration-intensive, people-intensive, decision-intensive and/or document-intensive. |
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Have a basic understanding of how much it’s worth to your business to “fix” the process in terms of time, money, and risk. |
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Educate yourself about the basic elements of BPM such as the design and simulation of process models, the automated execution of processes and rules, the coordination of human workflow, the monitoring and management of deployments, and the analysis and optimization of performance.
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One place to turn for such information is the report recently published by Forrester entitled The Forrester Wave™: Human-Centric Business Process Management Suites, Q1 2006
This comprehensive report contains a wealth of baseline information about BPM requirements and offerings, and evaluates BPM vendors on more than 200 criteria. While this particular report focuses on human-centric BPM suites, it includes information designed to help you understand the nature of your situation and identify what kind of BPM suite you need in the first place. Understanding your situation is particularly important because the 200 criteria each have a weighting assigned to them, and it is important that you know what is truly important and what less important to make your own project a success. |
| For more information, download the report The Forrester Wave™: Human-Centric Business Process Management Suites, Q1 2006 or the interactive Forrester Wave tool. |
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