In every process we have customer interaction points - how well we manage these “moments of truth” with our customers influences their levels of loyalty towards the firm. Loyal customers spend more and are more likely to recommend the firm to friends or collegues so making customers more loyal should be a major focus – and to do this we need to look at process from a customer experience perspective. How should we do this?
I like to think of a BPMS as process glue. Organisations will always have manual processes and disparate systems. These are the areas where work slips through the cracks, where time is lost, where customers are forgotten. A BPMS helps glue the process together. It provides process visibility, it stops the errors, it speeds the process up, it kills manual work, it provides meaningful data, it gives the customers what they need…(if the process is optimised first!)
There’s still a great appetite for ERP tools despite the fact that they’ve been around for quite some time. To me an ERP system is like a ready made meal - packaged, pre-processed and on the outside quite a nice idea. The idea behind ERP is that you have a bunch of processes that support key organisational capabilities built into an integrated software system. It’s a fix, but it doesn’t fix everything - there are always processes that need to be changed and gaps that need to be filled.
Do you have to move your processes to the cloud today? The answer is you don’t. Do it when you are ready and when you see value for your organization. If, and when you’re ready to start your journey into the cloud, you can go about it piece by piece, and as a hybrid, to minimize risk to your core operations and to get buy-in internally.
Perhaps you could begin with applications that bring tremendous value, yet are non-disruptive such as workforce planning and analytics? Your newspaper, music, pictures and videos are moving into the cloud, your bills and banking are moving to the cloud, you telecommute, and your social is moving into the cloud - it’s inevitable that your business applications, including HR will follow.
There are plenty of justifications companies can give for why they aren’t allocating capital to new projects, purchasing other businesses, and buying assets in general, but most of them tend to be pretty vague. “Uncertainty” due to the state of the global economy, the European sovereign debt crisis, or federal regulatory creep are my least favorite excuses that CFOs give, and there are others that are equally squishy and unsatisfactory.
But the truth is, there’s a far better apologia companies could present for not investing, and it’s rooted in a classic principle of corporate finance.
So you’re looking for a system that can help you improve your ability to execute strategy.You’ve been using a spreadsheet for many years to budget and although it is infinitely flexible, you are worried about the integrity of the data and the fact that no one quite knows how the macros and VB scripts work. Oh, and you never seem to have adequate data to make ‘real-world’ decisions.
ERP systems not only collect information about transactions, they also automate processes. The latter includes managing the handoffs between roles and enabling electronic document creation and management associated with that. Indeed, it was the promise of improving process management and process execution that spurred companies to adopt ERP in the 1990s.