Challenges

Nowadays, senior executives are faced with significant challenges with regards to their companies’ business processes.

• Balancing business process performance and service levels with costs

Business executives are increasingly pressed to balance increasing their companies’ service levels and business process performance while at the same time holding down the costs and ensuring the reuse of existing core technological assets. This challenge is very profound in companies, which exhibit lower back-office productivity, e.g. high operating cost, driven by:

• Time-consuming and multiple redundant tasks
• Predominantly manual work environments
• Complex/lengthy approval processes
• Multiple paper-based processes
• Complex administrative operations
• Limited back-office resources
   

• Business processes have been re-designed in isolation in the past

There is also increasing pressure from CEOs and competitors to think holistically about redesigning both core-strategic and non-strategic business processes. It is no longer an acceptable solution to install a process re-design that provides process improvement only for one group of employees while creating problems or barriers to other groups.

Today’s business processes often need to be designed as Web services (Could Computing or SaaS) and used to organise activities that occur across the business as a whole.

• No more large IT budgets and large upfront investment

In the current state of the world economy IT spending is under greater scrutiny and is viewed through a magnifying lens. Most IT budgets have been stagnant, as companies have been seeking ways to cut spending and to maximize efficiency and profitability. However, the lack of timely investment in business process streamlining may lead to losing competitive edge in the future.

• Requirement for advance audit and reporting capabilities

To comply with initiatives such as Sarbanes-Oxley and other laws and regulations, business processes and business systems need to provide process auditing and reporting capabilities.

Conclusion

Even in the current slow economy, companies cannot afford to ignore the efficiency and effectiveness of their business processes, otherwise they are risking becoming uncompetitive. Many companies are cancelling new IT investment projects and instead they are focusing on improving existing business processes leading to increased process efficiency and resource productivity.

Questions

So, if your answer is ‘Yes’ to any of the following questions, then you probably need to get in touch with us:

• Is your back-office not as productive as it can be? Is your company wasting valuable resources?
• Are you pressured to balance increasing service levels and back office performance and holding down costs?
• Have certain strategic or non-strategic business processes been ignored in the past as part of an optimisation program and you are paying the cost now?
• Has your IT budget been curtailed for significant new investments but you still want to improve the efficiency of your business processes?