Leverage BPM to Bridge the Gap in Difficult Economic Times

In these challenging economic times, the focus for many organizations will be to reduce staff, cut costs, and increase process efficiency.  Despite the cuts and reductions that took place in 2008, and may continue to take place in 2009, the current goals for your business most likely remain the same.  Moreover, in the immediate, the workload needed to accomplish those goals (total man-hours) does not decrease because your company is working with your original business process design.  As a result, the remaining workforce will be exposed to increased pressure to perform the same amount of work that was previously accomplished by the previous larger workforce.

Enter BPM.  With a quality BPM Suite in place, you will be able to immediately bridge the gap between today's necessary workload and your remaining workforce by using BPM features such as task routing to dynamic recipients, task queues, group lists, and load balancing workload across work teams.  Task routing features like these allow your existing employees, who are now wearing multiple "hats", to share the workload.  While utilizing BPM in this way can solve your work problems from a stop-gap perspective, ideally, because your business has changed, your business processes themselves will need to be reviewed and optimized.    

Using optimization features and process reporting from your BPMS, you will be able to analyze your company's business processes to determine the best changes to make to your processes for ideal process performance.  Because of your reduced workforce, you will need to optimize your business processes in relation to the remaining employees and their expertise sets.  With optimized business processes, you will find that you will be able to accomplish your original business goals while your smaller workforce works less man-hours.

Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus