What Makes a Successful BPM Implementation?

Ease of adoption and use

A successful BPM implementation must be easy to adopt. This may sound self-evident, but the reality is that BPM projects can fail when employees find their tools difficult to understand and use. For instance, according to Stephan S., a Process Engineer at Swissgrid, an energy company, “We did a GATT / WTO [request for proposal] and there were a lot of companies applying. One of our central points was the ease of use, especially for the end-users, but secondly for the modelers. I think that Signavio was selected because of this. It was very easy to use.”

Michael Z is an in-house IT Consultant at Interseroh GmbH metals company. They had a similar experience: “SAP Signavio Process Manager is very easy to use, and its ease is one of the reasons that people are adopting it. Next week, I will be teaching some of my new colleagues how to write models using the process manager. Using this solution makes it very easy for new people to start writing their own models, and we already have lots of people using it internally.”

“My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to look for ease of use,” said Mark V., Head of Global Operational Excellence at a media company. “The most important thing is to make it easy for people to model processes, as well as consume them.” Konrad P., a Manager of Process and IT at Phoenix emobility, a large manufacturing company, similarly noted: “What I like most about Signavio is the ease of use. A couple of team members received training from Signavio for two days, and now with this training, these people are training other colleagues within our company. The GUI is very easy to use, where you can sit together with your colleagues, discuss the process, and...build up the model.”

ROI and money saved

A successful BPM implementation needs to demonstrate tangible financial results. For this reason, a successful BPM implementation should be able to produce clear savings, either in money or time or both. Andrew L., a Managing Director at a consultancy, agreed, simply saying, “This solution provides good value for the money.” Markus B., also a Manager at a consultancy, did a proof-of-concept with a German automotive supplier that used process intelligence to improve the procure-to-pay process. Within a single process, they identified potential for savings of about $77,000 USD—per quarter.

Stanton A., a Principal Business Process Architect at the Met Office, a government agency, put it this way: “This solution has helped us save time. We have done some studies in simulations where we've contrasted where we were before and where we are now - contrasting the previous unwieldy process models with the new optimized ones with fewer tasks, roles, lower costs and higher quality and speed.” Eric M., a Business Process Manager at Chal tec, a manufacturing company, found “there is a saving in time by using Signavio Process Governance because we have made the process leaner.”

Stephan S. put the savings issue in perspective, given the requirements of the energy and essential services industry. “It's critical infrastructure, so doing things wrong at the core can cause a lot of damage and cost a lot of money, but it can also cause injury or death,” he said. “It is dangerous, therefore our processes need to be very well understood and need to be run very strictly.”

Collaboration and a process-centric mindset

Effective BPM generally involves improving collaboration between people and teams. Thus, a successful BPM implementation relies on imbuing people with a process-centric mindset. Signavio earned praise in this context, particularly for the SAP Signavio Collaboration Hub. “The Hub makes it easy to read the processes,” remarked Jan B., a Team Leader Business Process Management at Laepple AG, a transportation company. “It's comfortable to include a lot of information about processes and tasks.”

Eric M. further commented, “The feature that I like the most is SAP Signavio Collaboration Hub, where every user or every employee can see the process in the overview.” This is important because, Eric M. continued, “It adds transparency such that everybody can see and discuss the same process. You can change it, and it stays current for everybody. Also, you don't have to send an email or use a shared folder or anything like that. You can just work on it using the interactive SAP Signavio Process Manager.”

“Our employees rely on SAP Signavio Collaboration Hub to understand the processes,” said Swissgrid’s Stephan S. “They know exactly what to do and how to do it, what the procedure is, and if necessary, what forms to use.” Mark V. shared, “This solution has helped us carry out the entire process-improvement lifecycle in a unified hub by using SAP Signavio Collaboration Hub. We share all of the processing mappings with other colleagues in the company.”

Improved employee workdays

Successful BPM implementation rests on the responses of workers, and employees will only embrace BPM if they can see that it offers clear improvements to their day-to-day work. IT Central Station members praised Signavio in this regard. For example, Alejandro B., a Procurement Lead at a tech services company with over 10,000 employees, explained that “the solution has improved employees' workday functions. By reducing bottlenecks, rework, mistakes, and unnecessary activities, employees can focus on adding more value... and eliminating or at least reducing non-value-added activities.”

He further shared, “The collaborative features helped our team create a process-centric mindset because there's no process in any company that is not cross-functional. Every process touches another function. Taking the same example of supplier onboarding, it enforced the collaboration between accounting and procurement, minimized the effort, and therefore made the collaboration even smoother because you don't fight about bottlenecks on the reworks. You have one lean process from both sides.”

“Signavio's phone apps help improve employee's workday functions,” observed Sanjeev N., an Operations Change Manager at Morgan Stanley. He added, “People that typically pick up a process map for everything that they do are getting a lot of use out of it. The feedback so far is this is great. This is something that we needed. We've gone through a lot of transformation over the last ten years, but this is setting the stage for the future.” A Process Architecture Lead at an insurance company also found “this solution improved employees' workdays and functions.” He revealed, “It has given people the chance to react quickly to any changes, and the build of the automation has become quicker and easier.”

Next steps towards successful BPM implementation

Want to know more about successful BPM implementation, from the workers who've been there and done that? To learn more about real users’ experiences, you can visit ITCentralStation.com yourself and see what people had to say. In addition, each review included in this post can be found at the following links: