The BPM ROI
How is the process revamp paying off? According to Phillips, since the BPM effort began, Maritz has improved its customer quality indicators while reducing overhead. “Some of our cost ratios have improved between 8 and 24 percent,” he says. “That’s important since our industry is becoming increasingly cost-competitive.”

Overall, he notes, Maritz’s process is now “keyed more to where parts are in the pipeline than to people.” This helps him spot trouble more quickly. “I can see cycle time issues and reduce time to clients,” says Phillips.

Measurement Is Everything
The BPM work at Maritz won’t be finished anytime soon; this is a project without an end date.

“We continue to add subprocesses and refine subprocesses. I’m a believer in iterative improvement. We get a payoff from every phase.”

As for measuring and evaluating those improvements, that’s an area where Phillips advises CIOs and COOs to be careful. Phillips now says he wishes he had established key metrics and ways to capture the information earlier in the project.

“We plowed ahead lightning fast on the process side,” he says. “I should have created ways to grab crisper benchmarks.

“Now we’re already on the slope of improving. We didn’t have clear metrics that captured baseline performance. I’m thinking through linking process results to business results. If you can do that, then you get the visibility to prioritize your next investment.” Also on Phillips’s current to-do list, Maritz has implemented measures to improve cash flow and will look to BPM to strengthen that effort. “What we’re planning to do in BPM is to make people more aware of the major cash events within a cycle. That just saves the running around that can occur,” Phillips says. “We deal with some pretty big checks.” Ultimately, he says, Maritz wants to complete what he calls the holy grail of BPM: “We’d like to link our processes to supplier and customer processes.”

According to Forrester’s Leaver, that’s exactly what many customers are demanding—another reason BPM is rising higher on CIOs’ agendas.

Did Maritz’s customers demand process links? Not in so many words. Customers may be unhappy without realizing that their unhappiness stems from the fact that their processes don’t match up with a business partner’s processes. “What we saw was pain,” Phillips says. “As we tested the story with our clients, they were resoundingly supportive. This is a wave BPM can and must address,” he says.