Is Your BPM Vendor a Player or a Poser?

I have found that BPM vendors come in all shapes and sizes, but one of the important tells that BPM players have revolves around how much they leverage BPM in their own processes.

It’s pretty doggone easy for a vendor to tell a potential or existing client how to use BPM and their technology, but how much the BPM discipline is applied to running their business should be something you investigate.

The Seller: (The Hit and Run)

This kind of BPM vendor is only interested in selling and does not really use their own BPM technology for their processes at all. In fact they would not even see a need to use their own technology.

They generally just sell while the market is in a lift mode and quite often disappear when you are dealing with the implementation issues. It may be because they are small and understaffed, so support is hard to come by, or they want to engage you in an expensive engagement.

These kinds of vendors generally do not thrive for long and constantly shift their message to what sells best.

The Sympathetic: (Hands On: NOT)

These vendors are quite good at listening to your requirements and will stick around a service you, but they do not really have significant commitment to applying BPM to themselves (neither the BPM discipline nor their BPM technology). They will try to get you to use what they haven’t done themselves.

Like the Seller, they do not use their own stuff. They even copy other companies’ processes for their demos. Though sometimes other client problems are more suited to show strengths, you should question the source of the demo and why they did not include one of their own.

The Sampler: (The Slight of Hand)

This vendor uses its technology to build the coolest demo application and generally sweeps you off your feet with lots of sizzle. There is little BPM steak back at the office. These demos are made to deceive people into thinking that this is a real sophisticated BPM vendor. This is pretty deceptive, but it works for them. It’s a demo that deceives.

The Simple Simon: (Toe in the Water)

There are vendors that build token processes inside their own organizations like “expense tracking” or “conference room scheduling”. These kinds of processes are not going to really impact an organization and teach the BPM vendor the joy and trials of a true BPM effort. This is the shallow end of the pool for sure.

The Submerged: (Committed to Process)

This kind of BPM vendor does more than sip its own champagne, they get drunk on BPM. There are two kinds of BPM vendors. There are those that have a good number of their internal processes up on their own BPM technology and have experience a fair amount of BPM pleasure and pain. They are sometimes ahead of the market in BPM maturity.

The real BPM’er is the vendor that has implemented a process that crosses many of their own internal functions like ‘order to cash”. This means that they have had to deal with the organizational issues and diffuse functional excellence for “end-to-end” process excellence.

Bottom Line:

It is important for your BPM vendor to understand your challenges first hand. Make sure your due diligence includes several questions about your potential and existing vendor(s) use of their own technology.

Cross-posted from www.global360.com/blog