The Most Complex Process in the World

I want to talk a little bit about what is, in my mind, the most interesting part of having exposure to BPM initiatives across a wide range of industries.

This is in fact one of the great advantages that we at Lombardi have as a pure-play solution provider, and it’s something we’re going to continue to capitalize on, especially from a services perspective.  It’s also one of the things that I love most about my job - the opportunity to solve process problems in an array of different verticals, taking and sharing best practices and key learnings among them.

BPM folk love to talk about agility. And it is less and less a secret that BPM is one very important way that organizations can future-proof themselves against the inevitable. In today’s case, for example, it’s rising fuel prices, the mortgage meltdown, and unstable capital markets, each of which is having a unique effect on our customers.

In fact, one of the things that my team and I are spending a lot of time on these days is going out and looking at new and/or developing industry requirements, things from a compliance perspective, for example, that are coming up in legislative decisions and that may very well impact different organizations and different industries profoundly. By getting in front of these changes and helping customers to understand how they can use BPM to solve related/resulting issues, we help them not only comply, but also acheive visibility into things that they are mandated or regulated to do - proactively, instead of reactively.

Slowly, more and more enterprises are coming to understand the difference between proactively dealing with changes in the market, and again, doing so only reactively. The former group is taking advantage of a major opportunity to get a leg up on competitors.  BPM has the power to expose, and subsequently capitalize on, these opportunities.

But to get in on the front end of these opportunities  requires expertise and research that isn’t always readily available if you work in-house. Like I said above, I love my job because I get a chance to work in every industry/vertical imaginable and use my skills in each. Being proactive also involves being innovative, and often it means being the first in your industry to tackle a new problem.

When you have the kind of exposure that we have — exposure across industries and verticals — something reveals itself to you that might at first seem completely counterintuitive, and that’s what I’m driving at and what I want to share as the big takeaway of this post.

When you’re exposed to a diversity of BPM challenges, what you very quickly figure out is that whether you are dealing with, say, a huge manufacturer of X and Y parts, or a big box retailer, or a big entertainment conglomerate, all of the processes involved pretty much look the same.

Order to cash looks pretty much the same, the HR on-boarding process looks pretty much the same, inventory management looks pretty much the same. . .a process is a process is a process.

Now don’t get me wrong, the devil certainly is in the details, and there is a great deal of nuance involved. But after you’ve done it enough times, the similarities outweigh the differences by far.

Nonetheless, enterprises can get really hung up on how insurmountably complex and confusing their individual challenges are. Sometimes when you’re looking around in your own industry and seeing your competitors and colleagues having the same problems and also having the same difficulties solving those problems, it’s only natural to question whether there really is, in fact, a viable solution at all. But this is precisely the kind of mentality that eventually leads an organization to take a reactive approach to process, rather than a proactive one, which as I suggested above is a far superior way of going about improving the way you do business.

Everyone has “the most complex process in the world”. Sometimes it’s even a badge of honor, a sign that you’ve been to hell and back. . .and survived.  It’s not fun to be in this situation, and I’m not suggesting that anyone is exaggerating - there is nothing more legitimately mind-numbing and stress-inducing than a process that refuses to cooperate.

But once you’ve had experience in a variety of verticals and industries, you’re able to abstract these localized, industry-specific problems.  You can bring it up a level and you actually can learn from other industries. Like I said, a process is a process is a process. The traditional assumption is that what worked for a financial services firm couldn’t possibly work in the food services industry, for example. But is can, and it does.

Ironically we can often take learnings in one industry that has literally nothing to do with another (at face value anyway), and apply some of our successes and some of those learnings and really get companies to start thinking about things in a way that they maybe hadn’t thought about before. It can be a truly liberating experience.  The puzzle might be completely different, but the pieces are almost always the same. When an organization starts to realize this, it opens eyes and allows the team to be much more proactive. You start to look around and think ahead of the curve. You get hungry again, instead of just trying to make it out alive.

I try to help customers understand that the process is only as big and as bad as you make it, and that’s the truth.

We are working with several companies right now that will tell you that their process problems are the most complex of any organization that we will ever work with. Specifically we have one customer who is in a retail environment and they are working on inventory management and it is the most complex inventory management process ever, according to them. But we have another customer who is oversees and they are an entertainment company, and they are looking at inventory and order management and of course they think that they have the most complex process as well.  And yet another customer (that I can’t say much about, unfortunately) currently finds itself in the very same boat too.

If I were to describe all three inventory management processes, or even map them and use generic terms to document them, all three of those customers would think that the diagram I had put up on the wall was their own.

I want to encourage companies in any and every industry to think about what they can learn from other industries and verticals, even if it does seem counterintuitive at first. The help of a vendor or a consulting or services firm may help, but the fundamental insight that I want to convey still stands - a process is a process is a process - and the solution is out there. In recognizing this, you can pull yourself up out of a traditional, reactive approach and start thinking about competitive advantage again, about innovating ahead of the curve, and about taking on new challenges before they become a threat to your business.