System Transformation Portal

by William Ulrich

While business process reengineering (BPR) efforts of the 1990's fell short of expectations, business process integration (BPI) has become a vehicle for achieving sustainable value for corporations. BPI projects help foster revenue growth, increase customer satisfaction, facilitate e-business deployment and meet cost reduction targets.

BPI delivers these benefits by reaching beyond the traditional departmental retooling of processes found in BPR efforts to address a more comprehensive set of solutions. Specifically, BPI:

• Enables functional integration across segregated business units.
• Extends vertical process management into supply and distribution chains.
• Provides companies with e-business integration capabilities.

In other words, BPI allows previously segregated business units to work in synthesis, enables business units to integrate processes with external entities and consolidates redundant processes across functional areas. This results in an enterprise that is more efficient and effective, which in turn drives up revenues and drives down costs. BPI relies on certain critical success factors, the most important of which include:

• Ensuring that BPI is a business-driven initiative.
• Building a BPI coalition that crosses functional and enterprise boundaries.
• Utilizing technology that facilitates BPI collaboration and deployment.

Business requirements, by definition, drive BPI. This may seem apparent, but many organizations focus on technology integration when they can derive exponentially greater value from a business-driven approach. Examples of technology-driven integration are found in situations where IT leads an effort to connect Web-based applications to back-end systems and databases. While this provides tactical value near-term, BPI provides long-term exponential value by addressing integration from a business perspective.

The telecommunications industry, for example, contains numerous time-consuming business processes that hinder their ability to improve customer sales and service. One telecommunications firm, Nextel International, decided to address this challenge through a multi-divisional BPI initiative.

According to Nextel vice president Jorge Perez, they had "the objective of growing international digital subscriber units to the 1,000,000 mark and beyond." Perez went on to say that "this implementation capability will empower our markets with faster order processing times, improved network provisioning, lower operational costs and a faster sales cycle." In this scenario, the business requirements were clearly stated and were the driving factor in Nextel�s BPI plan.

Securing sponsorship and funding for a BPI project requires communicating these and similar benefits to business executives in a way that can be synthesized with corporate strategy. Business and IT units should, therefore, focus on customer oriented solutions that increase revenue on the one hand and control spending on the other. As this occurs, projects can achieve business unit sponsorship and the requisite funding to move forward.

The BPI Coalition

Given that BPI crosses functional and enterprise boundaries, most BPI initiatives will need to form a coalition of internal and external participants to succeed. For example, if an enterprise is planning to streamline and improve all processes related to customer service, they must address every customer "touch point" within the enterprise. This is likely to cross billing, marketing, support and many other internal and external business functions that rarely work together. A coalition of participants is needed to ensure that all parties are working towards a common goal.

Coalitions are built through communication, coordination and collaboration. People, left to their own devices, may not wish to collaborate with other business units or third parties. This is especially true when the benefits of a BPI project require integration of processes that extend across functional areas that do not view themselves as allies. The challenge is even more pronounced when third parties, such as outsourcing firms, suppliers or distributors, are involved.

Part of a BPI project sponsor's job is to define the benefits of a BPI project and communicate these to relevant and affected business units and third parties. This may include communicating how enterprise-wide benefits translate into benefits to a given business unit. Care must be taken in situations where people may be displaced by a BPI project. If this is the case, sponsors should find a way to shift these people into other roles or in some way compensate them.

The first step in coalition building involves assembling the management team from relevant and affected business units. This includes any business unit or third party owning or being impacted by the processes in question. Often times parties affected by a BPI project, such as a business unit that may be forced to change behavior due to changes in related processes, are left out of the loop. Leaving these people out of the loop can delay deployment of the overall project.

The project team is responsible for drafting and implementing the BPI project plan. They must also establish success criteria that can be subscribed to by the coalition as a whole. The sponsors must remain involved to monitor the success against these criteria and participate in project progress and deployment.

Deploying a large-scale BPI initiative requires technology to automate processes and enable collaboration among participants. This is particularly true when projects span multiple locations, environments, functional units, applications and organizational boundaries. In the prior example, Nextel used a product from Dallas-based Fuegotech to meet their BPI objectives.

Tool usage enables, but does not drive your BPI strategy. For example, an enterprise may wish to consolidate and build consistency into a set of steps within a cross-functional order process. The order process includes steps for taking the order, processing the order, checking inventory levels, shipping and billing. Because each of these steps is defined differently across multiple business units, analysts must create a plan to identify and rectify redundant steps.

Once this has been accomplished, BPI analysts can then define the newly rationalized processes within the BPI software and re-deploy them to the appropriate participants. Fortunately, powerful software is available to support BPI automation requirements.

BPI software should allow participants to collaborate with peers, management, subordinates, other business units, suppliers, distributors and customers via Web-based interfaces. To do this, BPI technology must incorporate certain functions to facilitate cross-functional projects.

BPI, by definition, must address the consolidation of redundant processes for both manual and automated processes. Many workflow products only address process integration within the context of one or more application systems. To be truly effective, a BPI product must extend to all manual and automated steps within the processes being integrated or the efficiencies companies are trying to gain will be lost. Along these same lines, BPI software must also manage business processes from end-to-end, allowing a series of processes to function in an uninterrupted fashion from the point where they are triggered to their natural conclusion.

BPI technology should be transparent to business and third party users. This means that the triggering of a process, or response to a process-driven request, must be incorporated into a Web-based environment that is available to each user involved in that process. Given that HTML is the universal interface for users, process initiation, review and approval should show up as just another Web-based front-end to the average user.

Modeling third party and enterprise-wide process flows provides analysts with a comprehensive view of how processes need to be retooled, consolidated and automated. Modeling also provides management with the insights needed to eliminate processes and this serves to streamline user value. BPI software should be able to visually depict process flows as well as facilitate the reworking of those process flows during a given project.

BPI software must be highly scaleable. This means that a BPI product should accommodate a large number of internal and external processes, which include processes extending into supplier environments, distribution chains and customer domains. Scale-ability is measured in terms of the number of processes, concurrent users, locations, types of security clearances, environments, roles and organizations that can participate.

BPI software should accommodate a dynamic level of responsiveness. In large, process-laden environments, a BPI product can meet this requirement by offering analytical tools to help business users identify bottlenecks, redundancies, waste, circuitous flows and other opportunities to streamline business processes on a rapid response basis.

Before moving into any type of full scale deployment of a BPI project, those chartered with the success of that project must minimally consider the three critical success factors discussed here. A BPI coalition ensures that the right team is in place to define success criteria and measure project progress against those criteria.

A business-driven approach ensures that a BPI project is not too narrowly defined and does not take a technology oriented view. Having the right tools in place ensures that the project can actually be implemented on a scale that meets the business requirements of the coalition. Paying close attention to these critical success factors throughout a BPI project will ultimately deliver the promised benefits of BPI.