Implementation of business process management in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Current global environment demands a constant drive to outperform and out-innovate the competition. Most organizations have identified business process improvement in an agile environment as the key to success in a competitive environment. Business Process Management (BPM) is one of the outstanding topics in today's business management discussions. It is a discipline which looks at organizations as a collection of processes. BPM enables process improvement while managing change. BPM can make a huge difference because it focuses on the business and combines both technologies and disciplined methodologies that build on top of corporate culture and values. According to a research by Gartner (2008), the BPM market growth in 2006 was 2 billions in USD. The projected growth in 20 I I is more than 5 billions in USD. Attention to BPM is now growing fast as organizations explore new ways to master their disorderly business processes to close the gap between strategic vision and goals and the operational execution and achievement of the goals. Those who deployed BPM enjoy enormous benefits of BPM. Irrespective of many successful implementations and studies done in the business world, Sri Lankan Organizations are reluctant to adopt BPM due to lack of understanding of BPM and misconceptions about BPM. Lack of visibility into business processes and lack of knowledge in their business operations are some challenges they face. According to questionnaire responses analysis, 77% of current initiatives or organizations in Sri Lanka are for business process improvement. Only a few, organizations have defined standard process models for their values chains; they occasionally have defined standard measures for evaluating the performance of major processes and sub processes. The organizations look at BPM as a way to save money by reducing cost, improve productivity and improve quality of processes and customer satisfaction to remain competitive. Proper implementation of BPM enables the ability to process more with less effort and higher quality. The core benefits of BPM are efficiency, effectiveness and agility. Benefits also consist of financial benefits such as low costs, higher revenue and improved productivity. In conclusion, the impact of business process management on organizational performance in transition economy and a set of guidelines is explained for implementing BPM in Sri Lanka.