About the Research As the non-profit association dedicated to nurturing, growing, and supporting the ECM (Enterprise Content Management) community, AII M is proud to provide this research at no charge. AII M Industry Watch provides neutral and unbiased market research reflecting the wisdom of our 65,000-member tribe of ECM technology users, helping you match and measure your ROI and implementation issues. In this way the education, thought leadership, and direction provided by our work can be leveraged by the entire community. We would like this research to be as widely distributed as possible. Feel free to use this research in presentations and publications with the following attribution:"© AIIM 2010, www.aiim.org". Rather than redistribute a copy of this report to your colleagues, we would prefer that you direct them to www.aiim.org/research for a free download of their own. The survey was taken by 495 individual members of the AIIM community between October 8th and October 23rd, 2009, using a Web-based tool. Invitations to take the survey were sent via e-mail to a random selection of the 65,000 AIIM community members.

Business Process Management (BPM) is not widely recognized as a single software product or even as a suite of related software tools. It is, more accurately, a business management practice which might utilize a number of dedicated software mechanisms. Many long-time users of document management systems would recognize BPM as the “workflow” functionality that has been driving scanned documents and forms through departmental business processes since the early 90s.

In many businesses, however, BPM takes on both broader and deeper aspects. Broader in the sense of integrating with other enterprise applications, taking in electronic forms and edocuments, populating transactional databases and providing a single point of interface for users. Deeper features include process modeling and simulation, reusable process modules, and process monitoring and optimization.

By its nature, BPM is an intrusive technology. It has an excellent track record of investment return largely achieved by changing and reshaping business processes for higher performance. As an agent of such change, the implementation of BPM presents many challenges, particularly when a process crosses departmental boundaries or when the proponents of the BPM project are not from within the line of business affected.

In this report, we set out to explore these challenges – what are the motivations, what are the factors for success, and what ROI is being achieved. We also measured planned levels of spending.

Key Findings

• 63 percent of responding organizations consider the importance of BPM to be significant or imperative.
• Hard-dollar savings from “Improving process throughput” and “Reducing process steps” are the two biggest drivers for BPM, followed by “Improving accuracy and repeatability”.
• 49 percent of organizations achieved payback of their investment in BPM tools within 18 months and a further 23 percent within two years. Additional projects are taking around 8 months on average to complete.
• 62 percent of those polled consider they have only addressed one fifth of the potentially profitable BPM projects.
• Accounts payable and accounts receivable processes showed the strongest success factors, followed by customer support cases, proposals and contracts, and claims processing.
• In a third of organizations, BPM projects are likely to be initiated by line of business managers, while in another third, IT takes the lead.
• Integration with other systems is the biggest technical challenge faced by our respondents.
• The strongest indicator for successful BPM processes is the presence of an existing process owner.
• 35 percent report that they have applied BPM to scanning all incoming mail.
• 6 percent are currently extending managed processes across the supply chain, but 19 percent have plans to do so.
• Just 4 percent of organizations are currently outsourcing BPM-enabled processes but this is set to rise to 18 percent in the future.
• In this sample, organizations are most likely to use BPM functions within document management and ECM (enterprise content management) systems (26 percent), followed by those using specific BPM functions in enterprise suites. Third is custom development and middleware, ahead of dedicated BPM suites (13 percent).
• 11 percent of organizations currently use BPM functions in SharePoint, and this is set to treble to 34 percent in the future, largely from new BPM users, and particularly in mid-sized organizations.
• Spending on BPM licenses looks set for a net increase over the next 12 months, with spending on BPM services and consultancy set to increase significantly.
• 36 percent look to buy their BPM tools from their existing ECM supplier, with 25 percent buying best-of-breed tools, and 23 percent preferring dedicated BPM suites.

Doug Miles is head of AIIM’s Market Intelligence Division. He has over 25 years of experience working with users and vendors across a broad spectrum of IT applications and was an early pioneer of document management systems for business and engineering applications. He holds an MSc in Communications Engineering.

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