Down in the dusty, dry streets of Laredo, Texas, a truckload of furniture arrives at a Lacks Valley Store. Unnoticed by the dock workers as they scan each product are the myriad exceptions typical in a large-ticket retail business: missing items, special customer orders and items that were never ordered but that showed up anyway. However, behind the scenes, a business process management (BPM) application is monitoring the warehouse and receiving systems, identifying each exception as it occurs.

The BPM application then goes beyond monitoring and actually prioritizes the exceptions and launches tasks for various employees (for example, walking an employee through the steps to review and address an expected order that did not arrive). The exceptions persist as tasks, or "in flight" processes, in the system and are monitored until they are resolved. The business analysts who actually deal with the problems are able to tweak the resolution processes in real-time as they learn more efficient ways to improve operations.

In Extreme Competition: Innovation and the Great 21st Century Business Reformation, author Peter Fingar describes the rise of intense competitors from around the globe who "innovate by how they operate" and who are attacking markets both large and small—including small Texas border towns. To respond to these new competitors, companies like Lacks Valley Stores must transform and evolve their operations faster than ever before.

BPM helps them do that. "The biggest impact has been catching exceptions early enough to actually do something about them," says Lee Aaronson, CEO of Lacks Valley Stores. "Before, we had to rely on a customer complaining about an issue or accidentally discovering that something was wrong." Now Lacks employees either receive e-mails alerting them to take action or they log in to a portal to manage exception tasks and resolve them before customers even notice.

BPM can transform customer contact operations as well. American National Insurance Co. (Anico) was one of the early adopters of BPM and has used it to streamline customer service processes across four business groups, resulting in a CSR workload capacity increase of 192 percent. "Our BPM initiatives have paid huge dividends," says Gary Kirkham, VP and director, planning and support division for Anico. "We eliminated the need for CSRs to ’dive bomb’ into multiple mainframe applications to handle customer and agent requests and built rules into our process to guide them through a single view of the customer’s information across multiple systems. BPM allowed us to both keep up with huge growth in our customer base and improve on all of our customer service metrics at the same time."