Building the BPM business case9 factors for minimizing the cost of a successful BPM investment

Whitepaper

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Business Process Management (BPM) solutions have delivered significant benefits to organizations demanding agility and efficiency in their business operations, but some programs have fallen short. What factors determine success or failure in BPM deployments? How can companies of all sizes enable themselves with the right BPM investments to deliver rapid value at minimized cost?

One characteristic shared by successful BPM strategies across the globe has been a clear-eyed analysis of those factors that drive the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of such programs.

By making a detailed analysis of both quantifiable costs - shown on the diagram below - plus other factors discussed later in this paper, your company can ensure it makes an informed decision about the best BPM Suite (BPMS) purchase for your needs today, and in the years ahead.

In this paper, we’ll explore 9 key factors from deployments across the world that have been used to deliver positive and compelling return-on-investment (ROI) as well as equip you with probing questions to ask of potential vendors.

Figure 1. The seeds of success - or project failure - are sown early so a thorough Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis is a useful exercise to understand the impact of your purchasing decision. At Bizagi, we recommend that you evaluate the critical current and future cost factors as summarized in the illustration below.

BPM: Building the business case

Purchase

Upgrades

ServersInfrastructure

Implementation

Training

Licence costs Functionality

Tech

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Stan

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Speed of delivery

Scalability

Reuse

References

ROI

9 COST FACTORS TO OPTIMIZE THE BPMS BUSINESS CASE

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Executive summary

MaintenanceTCO

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Why, when weighing up rival BPM systems, would you purchase the cheapest on offer – even if you knew that it would cost you more in the long term? Common sense dictates that we wouldn’t do the same when spending our own money.

For example, we can buy a functional printer for less than $100 but we know very well that the cost of maintaining that printer can easily triple the initial purchase price within a year.

We know our limited budget makes the cheap black & white printer the more tempting option, but we decide against it, knowing our

children will demand a color version further down the line.

In effect, we make a conscious and sensible decision to buy the more functional and cheaper-to-maintain printer now, rather than replacing the inferior model later and spending more money in the process. We apply the same long-term cost vs benefit ratio when purchasing a car, house or any other household expenditure.

So why do some companies struggle to consider the true TCO when making enterprise software investments?

Lack of informationWithout knowing all the factors that contribute to TCO, it can be impossible to make effective value judgements for the next 5-10 years (average lifetime of a BPMS).

Lack of visibilitySome vendors can’t, or won’t, reveal vital facts that impact ownership costs in areas such as functionality, upgrades and customization.

Two key reasons:

In this section, we'll look at the challenges of establishing a system's TCO and deep-dive into four of the nine key factors to consider when weighing up a system's total cost.

Calculating the true TCO: Key factorsWhat really drives the BPM Total Cost of Ownership?

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Bizagi has been able to incorporate many outstanding features characteristic of a state-of-the-art BPM solution within a simple yet powerful business process management suite. Bizagi is a solution that should be given due consideration by organizations looking for a fully-fledged BPM solution.

Jorge García, Analyst, Technology Evaluation Centers

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Functionality

Ease of use

Your business is changing daily, so ask yourself: does the software you are purchasingmeet your needs not only today, but in the future? Will it grow with your business or will you have to pay extra for new features?

E.g. For some, analytics on the tablet might be a ‘nice to have’ now – but how will you support your mobile workforce in the future? What about secure mobile or offline access? You need to be confident that your vendor will support your future business goals as part of the deal. Your company is investing in a system that will become a core component of

your business and IT infrastructure for a long time. Will the vendor be around through that period to support you? Will they continue to invest in order to innovate and expand the functionality and be aligned with the latest industry trends?

Ease of use can’t be easily quantified and yet it will have a huge impact on development speed and overall team productivity - especially if you need programming skills to make simple changes. Unless business and IT can clearly articulate what is required and easily collaborate at every stage then the end result will be misaligned with the business strategy – costing valuable time and money.

Managing change

Owning a BPMS is not only about helping the business optimize their profits: it can help you de-risk your processes. Let’s say you’ve spent

weeks or months perfecting your final process application, only to learn that new legislation is just around the corner. Your business needs to comply – or face heavy fines. Unless the BPMS is designed to manage changes fast, you will find yourself making manual entries for weeks and months – leading to costly mistakes and hurting your financial performance. Can you really afford to write off the loss of executive jobs, or fines costing thousands of dollars? BPM systems exist to enable rapid, continuous process improvement, so making process changes quickly and easily should be at the heart of what they offer.

• How does your system support business/IT collaboration? For example, can business users easily take part in requirements capture and process modeling?

• Can business users initiate process change without heavy IT involvement?• How easily is it to make changes on the fly?• How will you ensure process model changes are seamlessly propagated through

the whole system (across your omni-channel applications)?• How quickly will the change become operational?• Do you encourage your customers to make regular process releases? How often?

Ask thevendor?

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Ask thevendor

• Am I entitled to take advantage of new functionality as part of my existing contract?

• What product enhancements are on your roadmap?• How often do you release new products, or upgrade your functionality?• What is your R&D budget & quality of developers?• Is your software standards-based or proprietary?

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BPM: Building the business case

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Scalability

Integration & speed of delivery

If you are making an enterprise BPMS purchase, how well is the product suited for scalability and enterprise-wide deployments? You may decide to implement BPM on a smaller scale right now, but surely you are hoping for success and rapid rollout across other parts of the business?

This is the nature of BPM. Unless the BPMS is built for reuse – allowing similar processes to be quickly customized and ‘rewrapped’ for other parts of the business – your plans for enterprise-wide transformation will be brought swiftly to a stop.

• Can you potentially reuse various business objects such as: forms, processes, data, user interface components, and rules?

• What % of the system you are building is reusable?• How much will it cost to deploy an enterprise-wide solution?• How long will you take to deliver the above?• Can you provide customer reference sites where you have automated

hundreds of core and supporting processes?

This is a key cost in any initial system implementation and becomes even more critical in today’s customer-centric world. Connecting with enterprise systems - SharePoint and SAP for example - can make you more efficient but only if the connection points are quick to create and changes easy to make.

This is where data and its role in the overall system architecture plays a key role in lowering the total cost of system ownership ('The data

question' on page 6 explains more). Without this flexibility, you can easily find yourself changing your behavior to adapt to your ERP - hardly the notion of continuous improvement - or catering for extra costs and time to deliver the desired outcome.

Finally there is a speed of delivery. Will it take weeks, months or years to deliver the first process and start seeing value being added to your bottom line? Will you ever get there?

• Does the system support fast and clean connectivity with any data of my choice?• How do you integrate with data sources? Do you replicate or virtualize the data?• How long will it take to deliver the first business process?

Plan

Reality

Automatedprocess

Time

INABILITY TO REUSE PROCESS ELEMENTS STIFLES AUTOMATION SPEED

Figure 2

Sub-processes, business rules, forms and many more… Bizagi enables you to reuse any of these process elements, making it quick, easy and cost effective to automate many processes over time.

Ask thevendor?

Ask thevendor?

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BPM: Building the business case

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In traditional BPM systems, the data layer is treated alongside the process layer, coupling them tightly together. So when you want to make a change – connecting to a new CRM system for example – you create a link. This happens each time you want to change or adapt the process flow, eventually creating thousands of brittle ‘spaghetti strands’.

This can make the system costly to own as each process change involves complex and time-consuming work that becomes the burden of the IT department.

Taking a different approach to the BPM architecture can go a long way to ease short and long-term spending.

The data questionWhy a flexible architecture is critical in lowering TCOThe way your proposed system treats data – for example, how it is accessed, modeled and visualized – plays an important role when weighing up a system’s TCO.

BIZAGI SUITE’S 3-LAYER STACK ARCHITECTURE

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Enterprise Mapping Layer

Led by Business

Owned by IT

Bizagi BPM Suite

Process Layer

Data Layer

Widget Form Rule

LegacyDatabases

Reusable Business Objects

ERP, CRM, etc.

Entity Virtualization or Replication

Component Library

Figure 2

Bizagi’s unique flexible architecture ensures cost-effective reuse of process elements, essential for scalability in enterprise-wide deployments.

Cost-effective collaborationBy separating the process layer from the underlying data, business users are shielded from technicalities and can work far more effectively with IT.

Greater adaptabilityAll process elements can now be shared and reused among several processes. Without the need to ‘start from scratch’, adapting to business change becomes far easier and more cost-effective.

For example:

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A stack architecture separates complex problems into logical layers, making business process management simple and collaborative. This is an indispensable approach to support enterprise-wide BPM initiatives.

Software acquisition

Bizagi users are able to try full enterprise software before purchasing. In addition to free modeling and automation, Bizagi allows up to 20 users to test the working system in a development or test environment, without time constraints and with zero financial commitment.

Limited free software trials in terms of timescales and functionality.

For example, many free versions offered are acut-down version of the full product offering limited functionality that your business will outgrow very fast - you will then be asked to pay a hefty price for an upgrade to access full product capability.

Transparent price list publicly available from bizagi.com. Licence fees are charged per user. Connectors, ready-made processes, UI blocks and all other functionality are included at no additional cost.

Additional functionality often comes at extra expense above the initial licence fee. Many vendors offer several products to support the BPM lifecycle, leading to multiple UIs, costly integration and multiple support points.

Aimed at being lower than the annual maintenance fee seen across the market. Minor upgrades are easily achieved by the customer.

Over 20% of the licence fees, while Bizagi maintenance costs are at 18%.

‘Light footprint’ platform requiring only single servers for both web application and database. Supports increasing processes and user numbers with only small memory increments. E.g. Initial consumption of 650Mbs leading to an average 1.2 Gb. Largest implementations require a maximum of 2.5Gb.

Will vary significantly depending on the size of the BPM deployments. As an illustrative example, in one competitive scenario, whilst some BPM vendors required 24 servers Bizagi was able to deliver the same capability with just two.

Software implementation

Bizagi’s QuickStart program allows the firstprocess to be delivered in less than 7 weeksand in some deployments it required just two people: a Business Analyst and aTechnical Analyst.

Varies significantly; on average most BPM vendors deploy their systems with over 10 consultants; 7 digit sums and projects that take years to deliver are commonplace.

Bizagi offers free, online role-based training personalized to your needs. Advanced instructor-led training - both office or online - is also available.

No other vendor offers free training.

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Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) checklist

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Future proofingBizagi delivers all the functionality you need to cater for your future growth, from mobile reporting & analytics to a flexible and reusable data model.

Standards-basedFrom Object Management Group (OMG) modeling notation standards to Java: Bizagi BPM Suite gives you the freedom to connect by supporting common industry standards for process modeling & integration.

Deep commitment to R&DWe invest >25% of our revenues into Research and Development. Our products are customer-focused (90% of Bizagi v10.6 was based on user feedback).

Fastest deliveryUtilizing our proven ‘Spark’ delivery framework, we will guide you towards a process automation project that will deliver your first enterprise process in less than 7 weeks.

ScalabilityThe Bizagi platform easily powers some of the largest BPM programs in the world including one for the global leader for sustainable technology, Abengoa, with 15,000 users and 400 processes.

Ease of reuseBizagi's marketplaces: Process Xchange and Widget Xchange, provide ready-made process apps and UI building blocks respectively, enabling customers to fast track their development.

Responsiveness & adaptabilityOur customers work on tight process change schedules, releasing on averagebi-weekly cycles to get critical business model and operational changes to market fast – just like Bizagi customer Generali.

Our communityJoin Bizagi and reach out to 500,000+ like-minded BPM experts through ourcommunity forums and social media groups.

Active referencesWe have customer sites across all corners of the globe reaching the mature stages of process excellence and with the delivered ROI to prove it – like Colpensiones in South America enabling 41,000 cases through their BPM system daily.

A maniacal focus on ROINo metric, no project… that’s our mantra. Our consultants work with our customers to derive the data points for success and review them regularly. Discover ROI with Bizagi.

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10 ways Bizagi delivers lowest BPM TCO

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The way people can build a process application in Bizagi is very impressive. It is much easier than with most other platforms.

Dr Sebastian Adam, Leader of Requirement Engineering & Head of Business Process Management Study, Fraunhofer IESE

When considering the purchase of a BPM system, it is critical to take into account not just the most obvious costs but those that will impact ownership over the long term. The core pillars of low TCO - functionality, ease of use, scalability and speed – lead us towards an efficient system that has all the power & features

of an enterprise platform, yet can be implemented in a far shorter timescale - and with a fraction of the resources required by competitor systems. That platform is Bizagi.

Get in touch today to learn more.

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In conclusion

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Bizagi offers a unique approach to marrying business processes and structured data.

Positioned as a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™ : BPM Platforms For Digital Business, Q4 2015

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About BizagiBizagi offers a risk-free BPM platform that powers $10bn transactions for 500+ enterprise customers worldwide including GE Capital, adidas, and Old Mutual. With Bizagi, you can try, test and automate complete processes without financial commitment – and only pay once you’re ready to deploy. That’s why we have zero project failures and can deliver quantifiable ROIs fast.

Bizagi is headquartered in the UK with offices in Europe, Latin America and the US, supported by a worldwide partner network.

For more information, please visit the Bizagi corporate website at www.bizagi.com Follow Bizagi on Twitter: @bizagiBizagi London OfficeT: +44 (0) 1753 379270E: marketing@bizagi.com

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