Speaking with…

BM. Compared to ERP, SCM and CRM, BPM is a relatively new acronym on the scene? Would you say it has lived up to expectation so far?

JK. Business Process Management (BPM) is a combination of technology and management practice. Effective execution in both of these areas is imperative for success. Software companies, such as TIBCO, offer products that address the technology requirements and services to fulfil the management practice part of the equation. BPM helps to orchestrate people and systems across the organization, enabling enterprise companies to more quickly, consistently and efficiently conduct business.

Based on recent customer data, we believe BPM is living up to its expectations. We hired an outside agency to conduct a customer survey and the results are very compelling – BPM delivers on its promise. All the companies we surveyed realized an increase in productivity, 95 percent witnessed an improvement in their quality of service, and more than 80 percent saw a reduction in their operating costs. BPM delivers real value. Industry analysts agree, and Jim Sinur of Gartner states: “BPM wins the ‘triple crown’ of saving money, saving time and adding value.”

BM. What is demand like today for BPM solutions and is this growing? What is driving this trend?

JK. The global BPM market is demonstrating strong growth, with industry analysts estimating growth between 10-20 percent annually. A Gartner Dataquest research report estimated the annual growth rate from 2003 to 2008 to be 15 percent, while similar reports from IDC show growth in the market beyond this figure.

There is a confluence of business and technical drivers for this growth. On the business front, enterprises have found that to remain competitive they must be more adaptive, flexible and generally more responsive to change. Companies are also facing ever-tightening compliance requirements, resulting in a focus on process standardization and documentation. On the technology side, BPM has reached a level of maturity that enables software to provide end-to-end process orchestration to give enterprises the control and flexibility they are seeking.

BM. What role can BPM play in improving a business’ development strategies?

JK. BPM delivers significant business benefits, one of the biggest being greater end-to-end process visibility. Visibility into a business process provides organizations with the information needed to make better business decisions. It can help organizations better allocate resources to meet changing customer demands or peaks in their business. Concurrently, visibility can help companies make decisions about key strategic investments. BPM provides companies with visibility into business operations like sales performance, customer service and order management, which ultimately enables a business to make smarter decisions about how to deploy resources.

BM. With so much out there on the market now, what advice would you give to a company seeking out BPM solutions – what should the key considerations be?

BM. As I stated before, BPM is a very popular term. Suppliers are approaching it from all angles, which can be overwhelming to an organization. There is one crucial factor that must be addressed before considering or even deploying a BPM solution – a company must understand what the key drivers are and the resulting requirements for the project. I am not talking about a list of technology requirements or features and functions, but the business reasons for undertaking a BPM project or initiative. Is a company facing competitive pressure, which is driving an increased focus on customer satisfaction and customer retention? Does that pressure mean the company needs to improve the way they process orders or resolve service requests? What are the key processes and who owns them? These are the most important issues that should drive the technical requirements for implementing a BPM solution.

Companies should view their BPM technology provider as a partner and they should pick a partner that has a proven track record with their customers. This will help to ensure their success with BPM. TIBCO has more than 15 years experience in the BPM and workflow space, manifested by over 800 customers, and over 500,000 users around the world and across multiple industries. This experience affords us and our customers with a competitive advantage.

BM. What kind of returns might customers expect?

JK. Our customers have seen significant improvements in productivity, quality of service, operating costs and process cycle times. Another important return we heard about from our customers is employee satisfaction. More than 75 percent of companies that implemented TIBCO BPM products reported an increase in morale and job satisfaction. This is a testament of our success with BPM, as business processes involve people and people are generally a company’s most important asset.

There are, however, many more benefits to BPM that are intangible or difficult to quantify, such as employee satisfaction. Earlier I referenced a comment made by Jim Sinur about how BPM saves time and money and improves quality. We know that a better process improves quality, but being able to quantify the dollar amount of that improvement is difficult. BPM is very powerful – it helps organizations improve processes and how they coordinate widely-disseminated resources, it improves visibility and the agility needed to respond to that information. All of these things are very valuable, but difficult to equate to in terms of dollars.

BM. But what makes your own solutions so different?

JK. Our BPM offering, the TIBCO Staffware Process Suite, is unique for four main reasons:

Balance – BPM is a collaborative process where IT and business expertise is required. Our product offers a modular environment with modules tailored to the appropriate end user. For instance, you want business people to define business rules, so rules are defined in an interface similar to Microsoft Excel; conversely, you want IT managing integration tasks, so that environment needs to be tailored to their specific needs. The bottom line is that we know it’s important for both parties involved, and we provide easy-to-use tools to facilitate collaboration.

Flexibility – our product suite offers superior flexibility at every layer of BPM. At the process definition level we provide an easy-to-use modelling environment designed for process owners. A robust rules manager to empower business users to create and modify business rules without IT’s help and with no impact on the process. We also provide a powerful process engine with superior process orchestration, and support for dynamic sub-processes, version control, and tremendous scalability. Finally, we also offer a complete integration layer, based on service-oriented concepts, that enables flexible and cost effective integration.

Recognizing the importance of IT investments – our powerful and flexible integration capabilities coupled with our open systems architecture allow TIBCO’s BPM offering to interact seamlessly with existing IT systems. Ultimately, we enable organizations to get more out of their existing investments by incorporating them into business processes.

Proven success – as I mentioned before, we are not new to the BPM space. We have been recognized by industry analysts like Gartner and Forrester, and by our customers as having a leading and proven product.

BM. Can you give any examples of cases in which you’ve seen these kind of results?

JK. We have had a great deal of success with our customers. One that comes to mind is Allianz Ireland, which has experienced an 80 percent increase in the efficiency with their claims management process. Their claims processing was reduced from weeks to days, with a complete return on their investment in just six months. Another customer, ABN AMRO, reduced costs and the amount of time for back-office operations using our BPM technology. They saved the equivalent of 1000 additional full-time employees and the overall quality of their business services has improved significantly.

BM. It all sounds pretty impressive. But are there any limitations or disadvantages to BPM?

JK. The most common pitfall is something I alluded to earlier – BPM is more than just a technology issue. For a company to be successful it needs to realize this and to embrace the cultural changes required to become a process-oriented organization. To properly prepare for this change, companies must communicate, deal with change management, and have the discipline to execute. Other common pitfalls include over analysis and modelling of processes, striving for perfection with the first process, and not going after quick wins with the first project.