AIIM Research: More Than Half Of Businesses Now View BPM As Imperative Or Significant

Business Process Management also delivers ROI: 41 percent see payback within one year and 17 percent within six months

Business Process Management (BPM) is becoming an essential element of modern business, with more than half of business executives saying BPM is either significant (38 percent) or imperative (17 percent) for their organizations, according to new AIIM research launched recently.

BPM’s increasing maturity is borne out in the return on investment (ROI) that many organizations are seeing. Of the 41 percent that report payback within one year, 17 percent reach ROI within just six months. With BPM, organizations can also take advantage of mobile and cloud opportunities for sharing knowledge and documents.

The new report, Process Improvement and Automation 2016 - A look at BPM, revealed that user-defined process mapping and modification is the top requirement for more than half of respondents, while around two-thirds say analytics and reporting are considered mandatory.

“The importance of BPM is rightfully being acknowledged – it can help reduce paper handling and inefficiencies in activities such as contracts and invoicing. It can also improve people and systems performance by giving remote workers access to the same ‘experience’ as if they were inside the firewall,” said Bob Larrivee, chief analyst, AIIM. “Poor processes will seriously impact an organization’s ability to access, manage and leverage information, so BPM’s growing maturity as an enterprise tool will continue. However, it’s important for users to report back on successes and justify spend back to the business.”

BPM, a way of managing an organization’s processes, is seen as an effective way to ensure those processes are efficient and effective. Indeed, the research revealed that faster processing of business critical activities has provided the biggest value for 53 percent of respondents. Forty-five percent cite their biggest value from fewer errors and exceptions processing.  

The research also showed that 67 percent of organizations see mobile and cloud support as important, while for almost nine in 10, audit trails and executed process must be secured. Benefits beyond ROI include a decrease in review and approval cycles (33 percent), better routing to and between individuals (62 percent) and greater organizational agility and routing between processes (42 percent).

“There can be no doubt that BPM is helping to improve processes within organizations all over the world,” continued Larrivee. “But it is starting to go beyond that, with two-thirds of executives in our research seeing BPM as change management. As organizations continue to come to terms with the massive increase in data and information in modern business, BPM / change management will become ever more valuable as those organizations look to better capture, store and manage that information.”

Other key findings in the ‘Process Improvement and Automation 2016 - A look at BPM’ report include:

• A large majority (97 percent) of respondents see BPM as a systematic approach to improving business processes.
• Stuck-in-process is the biggest operational problem for 58 percent of respondents; for 46 percent, it is dealing with compliance errors.
• Outsourcing of payroll and benefits is routine for 35 percent of respondents. Outbound mail and print are routinely outsourced for 30 percent.
• Process governance policies are in place for 48 percent, with 14 percent of those respondents indicating they are enterprise-wide.

The research for ‘Process Improvement and Automation 2016 - A look at BPM’ was underwritten in part by ActivePDF, HP, ibml, Iron Mountain, K2, Kofax, Konica Minolta, Media Strategies, OpenText and Systemware. The full report can be downloaded here at http://info.aiim.org/process-improvement-and-automation-2016.

The survey was taken using a web-based tool by 486 individual members of the AIIM community between March, 2016, and April, 2016. Invitations to take the survey were sent via e-mail to a selection of the 180,000 AIIM community members.

About AIIM

AIIM has been an advocate and supporter of information professionals for 70 years. The association’s mission is to ensure that information professionals understand the current and future challenges of managing information assets in an era of social, mobile, cloud and big data. Founded in 1943, AIIM builds on a strong heritage of research and member service. Today, AIIM is a global, non-profit organization that provides independent research, education and certification programs to information professionals. AIIM represents the entire information management community, with programs and content for practitioners, technology suppliers, integrators and consultants.