EVOLUTION OF BPR

“You can’t fix stupid”

Posted on the February 26th, 2008 under Value of BPR by Gregory Yankelovich

This is the name of Ron ‘Tater Salad’ White’s comedy show and it made me think - is it actually true?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8suVjclu8Zo[/youtube]

Can application of business process fix stupid? After a period of reasonable deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that Ron is right, they don’t call him “Tater Salad” for nothing. Even BPR can’t fix stupid, but it can eliminate it.

Nine weeks ago I ordered an audio adapter for my Blackberry Media Player, which never worked as advertised, from Seidio (seidioonline.com). After a long wait I called them and found out that they misspelled my address and the package was returned to them by USPS. After waisting half an hour of my time validating my address they assured me that I will have it in a few days. A couple of weeks passed with no package in sight, and I called them again, but nobody could explain the mystery of the missing package. I asked to cancel my order and to return the payment to my credit card, but was begged to wait just a little longer. Week later I filed a dispute for the charges with my credit card provider and completely gave up an idea of stereo sound coming blissfully from my Blackberry. Last night I got an email from Seidio, telling me that the package was returned again by USPS and requiring to validate the address. Imagine that to my surprise they shipped it now to my billing address and made 2 errors in it.

You probably wonder, as I do - how difficult would it be to automatically grab the addresses from the web form completed by a Customer to print shipping labels?

Economics of Business Process

Posted on the February 15th, 2008 under Value of BPR by Gregory Yankelovich

“Money is always there, but the pockets change.”

- Gertrude Stein (1874 - 1946)

We use different terms to describe initiatives to Optimize and Automate Business Processes which conceived to support Organizational Transformation. The following are just a few examples, and virtually every company invests into these initiatives on one scale or another:

• Business Applications software implementation
  
• Business Process Re-engineering;
  
• Enterprise Software implementation
  
• ERP, CRM, etc. deployment

I estimate that at least US$ 500B was shelled out last year alone (2007) globally to buy software licenses and implementation services from the suppliers of business application software and integration services. This estimate does not account for any hardware and Change Management costs incurred in the process. One may disagree with a methodology or assumptions I have used, and I welcome suggestion for improvement, but hardly anyone would dispute that there is a lot of money being spent on these initiatives.

There is a mind numbing number of books, articles, and white papers that can be found in the Internet searches that attempt to shed light on issues of Economics and Return on Investment for these initiatives, but they largely focus on efficiencies of software engineering projects, but I have failed so far to find any material explaining an economical rationale for such a massive investment. I would greatly appreciate if anyone points me to the right source. I understand of course that the quest for higher productivity and competitive pressures are closely associated with these initiatives, but I would like to learn how successful they are and how do we know when we succeed or fail.