Associated Challenges
The BPM market is new and hence very crowded. There are very few pure play BPM vendors in the market, who have built their systems considering business driven top down BPM approach and enterprise scale of deployment.

According to Mashruwala of Savvion, “Processes like data exist in all software applications. As a result there are several vendors from adjacent fields, with their traditional roots in content/document management and Enterprise Application Integration, who have tried to reposition their products as BPM. BPO companies are clear about their expectations from the BPM system but get disappointed when BPM products from adjacent fields fail to deliver.

BPM should not only manage the systematic knowledge available within the organization but also capture and convert the abstract knowledge available into systematic knowledge. Commenting on the challenges associated with BPM, Vijai Pande, VP, quality, Omnia BPO says, “The biggest challenge of BPM is loosing the human side of the processes. And therefore balance is extremely important. Correctly measuring the effectiveness of the process is extremely important and one has to ensure that the measurements are aligned, integrated and available on demand-a move away from data collection to data capturing and real time analytics.”

“Companies are looking at different ways to enhance their service portfolio and operations, and are therefore depending upon various technologies to improve overall productivity” SV Ramana, CTO, Genpact	“Outsourcers are conscious as they are under pressure to internally show cost and quality advantage of outsourcing, and for this BPM systems are their best vehicle” Kaushal Mashruwala, MD, Savvion

Another challenge is the belief that it is the responsibility of a bunch of people popularly known as the quality team. While it is good to have this driven by a set of people within the organization, the active participation of all the functions is extremely important. And people driving should move from being merely those who inform where the problem to those who also suggest ways to fix it.

Higher Adoption
As per the studies conducted recently, only 2% of the activities/processes within the organizations are true value adds-something for which the customers are ready to pay. This leaves the organization with enough room for improvement in efficiencies. Removing non-value added steps will lead to an increase in velocity-things will happen faster, processes will become simple and repeatable, easy to manage and standardized across locations, sites and client areas.

The main vendors of the BPM process are trying their level best and adopting various unique measures to reduce overall costs using BPM. Omnia BPO has started an initiative around this which is known as OPMS (Omnia's Process Management System). OPMS is aimed at documenting critical processes related to operations and enabling functions, process measurement, developing dashboards for relevant matrices measurement, audit and controls for adequacy and adherence and process improvement by identifying non-value added steps, and driving improvement through lean and Six Sigma improvement methodologies.

On the other side, Savvion also started leveraging BPM systems advantages for achieving operational excellence and reducing overall cost of the business. The company has helped BPO companies reduce cost in the entire process lifecycle. Through the ability of BPM systems to convert modeled processes into executable process applications without mutation, BPO companies have significantly brought down transition cost and time.

By having automation, process execution is repeatable, and there is also significant reduction in cost of boarding new agents on an existing process. Talking about its advantage, Mashruwala of Savvion India says, “Several of our customers have taken advantage of this to counter extremely high employee turnover. Effective process monitoring and measurement results in better quality and SLA management, and hence reduced cost due to penalties.”

“By creating domain specific BPO platforms using our BPM system, some of our customers have reduced time-to-revenue from 12 weeks to 2-3 weeks as well as mnaged significant reduction in operating and change management cost of process solution” added Kaushal.

Industry Acceptance
Leaders in BPO have already accepted pure play BPM systems and have seen great success with it. Some of the other large players, who had originally gone with Document Management based workflow products or Integration centric BPM products are aggressively reevaluating their BPM strategy with pure play BPM vendors.

Expressing his views about the acceptance of BPM process, Vijai Pande of Omnia BPO says, “I think the industry has accepted BPM though in different forms. And this choice is more by compulsion than by design.”

The Indian BPO industry has already realized the importance of being innovative to increase efficiencies and become effective as due to increased cost their profit margins are becoming thin. BPM also enables BPOs to deploy processes rapidly, which could be easily managed, and bring faster return on investments with improved bottom-line.

Explaining the importance of the concept of BPM for the Indian BPO industry, Kaushal of Savvion says, “Outsourcers are becoming more and more cost conscious as they are also under pressure to internally show cost and quality advantage of outsourcing their processes. And in this scenario, it is imperative for BPO companies to start on the journey of process excellence-and pure play BPM systems are their best vehicles.

In today's globalized technology market, BPO has become one of the hottest trends in organizational configuration. Unfortunate for the BPO environment is that the processes are invisible and intangible.

Any BPM exercise will make the processes visible-not the way one thinks or feels but the way things are happening in reality. To effectively implement a BPM initiative, BPO companies should follow a systematic discovery process and create a BPM strategic plan.

Arpita Prem
arpitap@cybermedia.co.in