Wyeth's BPM initiative beginning in R&D is surprising to Pramod Sachdeva, managing director of Princeton Blue, a systems integration firm that targets the pharmaceutical industry. "This is starting on the R&D side? I think that's tremendous," he says, explaining that R&D technology groups are often too focused on specialized informatics technologies to pay attention to BPM. And that's too bad. "There's so much value to be created on the R&D side in pharmaceutical companies" where BPM could make a difference, he says.

Potential customers tend to be skeptical of claims made for BPM that "sound too good to be true," Sachdeva says. But it's coming into its own as a technology and a discipline. What's changed is the quality of the tools, which simplifies the integration required to orchestrate processes across multiple systems. "It's only in the last two to three years that I've felt these products have reached the level where they can truly bring value to the business—and not just be another tool for IT," Sachdeva says.

Still, the tools can only do so much. Implementing BPM can be a way of identifying and addressing the gaps in a process that cuts across divisions. But those in charge of the different divisions still have to agree on how the new, automated process should work, Tobaccowalla says.

Lacking that, the result is likely to be "a layer of bureaucracy that nobody is interested in," he says. "So the real magic is getting the business process right."