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By Lauren Bielski
As companies look toward recovery, they are increasingly adopting business process management approaches -- particularly a variant known as "lean BPM" -- to gain insight into how to work more efficiently.
Lean BPM is an improvement methodology aimed at identifying interconnected business processes and establishing existing correlations and dependencies. While the approach can eliminate wasteful steps, it also has the potential to overhaul process by clarifying what goes into cycle times.
After a quiet stretch, Procise, a Frankfurt, Germany-based management consultancy, has been seeing considerable demand for process design work, according to Jeff Book, the firm's director of Six Sigma and lean BPM. One reason for the renewed enthusiasm, especially among the financial firms that make up the bulk of his clients, is the emerging regulatory burden, said Book. But a lean deployment can be motivated by other company-specific requirements, such as the need to collapse redundant capabilities affiliated with a broad functional unit like payments, lending, or compliance.
"The financial services industry has to deal with legacy infrastructure and traditional ways of working transactions that make it a prime candidate for lean evaluation," said Book.
Lean analysis is not just an academic exercise. "While it isn't the 'universal hammer' in an emerging IT toolbox," he said, lean BPM is often one of the best options to define wasteful process steps in circumstances where complex departmental activities can obscure the realities on the ground. When you consider the typically undocumented activities of individual workers, and somewhat removed middle and senior management, it's clear how complicated such cost and process evaluations can be -- and how revealing.
Procise primarily focuses on process discovery, explained Book, where people and process interactions are systematically identified, analyzed and logged. Some of the most advanced organizations may make use of knowledge management systems or wikis to share process discovery findings and lean-related best practices, he added. The discovery work is not merely about what systems and applications do, but what people do or don't do, stressed Book.
An Elegant Workflow
Generally, lean is used to adopt fewer and more-affordable steps, which creates an elegant workflow design while ramping up utility. As an example of what the approach can deliver, Nari Kannan, CEO of service process management tool provider Ajira, recently pointed to its role in shrinking home mortgage loan timelines from about a month to two weeks.
While defining opportunities for growth is a plus, lean first addresses chronic -- and costly -- infrastructure and workflow concerns, often around customer-facing routines in lending and case management. Reworking these key departmental areas might require adoption of Visio-style tools to visualize new ways of enacting process, or the adoption of business process platforms. But it's not about throwing technology at a problem and hoping for the best, note observers.
Vendors that assist in the lean process include London-based Pegasystem, which offers its SmartBPM suite, and Redwood, Calif.-based Serena, with its Business Mashups solution. IBM has recently announced its virtual BPM community, BlueWorks, which also features cloud-based process and strategy tools. The BlueWorks team will be blogging on how to combine BPM, service-oriented architectures and lean Six Sigma to help businesses "accelerate business results."
A successful lean rollout might also demand the adoption of new data models and approaches to creating and managing IT environments. But while there are purely IT-centered implications to lean adoption, the bigger payoff may be a new perspective on process. Or, as Tom Judd, a consultant and senior director of product excellence at Motorola, put it, "a view of a structure depends on its intended recipient -- that is, the role and nature of the stakeholder, be that stakeholder a Wall Street firm or a vendor."
In a recent blog, Forrester analyst Clay Richardson advised that firms hire practitioners who "eat, sleep, and breathe" process to get the best results.
And, according to Procise's Book, successful lean practitioners understand that it is important to evaluate and document the maturity of development processes or teams using a numerical scale, as recommended by the Capability Maturity Model Integration approach.
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