BPMS for SME organisations

Someone recently asked me: "Are BPMS limited to provide solutions only to large corporations given the needs and costs of the projects involved?"

We have found that both SME and Enterprise customers can achieve benefits from BPM solutions. A good BPM integrator will quantify the benefits and help clients prepare a business case before investment.

We find 35% - 70% of our client's business processes are either non-value or business value-add activities. Eliminating the non-value add and automating business value-add activities can generate significant opex savings. SME organisations usually have more manual and fragmented processes, especially prevalent in firms who have grown quickly.

A tier 1 BPM product such as IBM BPM (Lombardi) or Pega systems is going to require license investment of £75K - £100K for an initial project and another £60K - £100K for staff development and integrator support.

You can make your business case by optimising your process to reduce 3 FTE of work per annum (assuming £15,000 salary per annum and a 3 yr ROI). If the company is willing to work with you to identify new revenue opportunities and quantify the benefits of process transparency, improved customer service & reduction in rework costs your business case will be even stronger.

Of course, we deal with service industries (finance, telecoms, retail, healthcare & government), I am not sure if you would achieve the same results in manufacturing.