Study on the use of BPM tools in Brazil reveals diverse level of maturity and interest

Feb. 14, 2013 - PRLog -- The use of BPM (Business Process Management) has, little by little, been becoming a commonplace within Brazilian organizations, and it is already considered by many managers and businessmen a global trend. However, even though there is a lot to be lectured on about the concept, it is still hard to find research over how BPM is applied to private and public companies, making it just as difficult to define guidelines for the adoption of the tool.

Due to these troubles professionals from Venki Technologies have started, in August 2012, a research project that built upon initiatives found on the web in order to create Diagnóstico BPM Brasil (BPM Diagnosis Brazil). "By around August 2012 we realized that the Brazilian BPM market lacked information about the tool. So we've studied initiatives on the web and found BPTrends, which served us as a model to develop the study. We've then elaborated a survey to evaluate important points about what sort of knowledge companies had about BPM", Venki Technologies CEO Wallace Oliveira explains.

The campaign "BPM Diagnosis Brazil 2012" launched in October 2012 and only a few days after it did, businessmen and professionals from the processes area showed interest in being part of it. During four months information from different private and public organizations all over the country from several fields were collected through questionnaires. From this information a general study was conducted and an individual report for every partaker company was put together. This helped reveal data about BPM from a national point of view, identifying technological trends for 2013. "Those were four months of intense dedication, collection of data and hard diffusion of the project in social networks, and we've had help from the "community" that took part on the process. All in all 161 surveys were answered and from these 88 were finished, making way into the final report", Wallace Oliveira comments.

According to the CEO from Venki, the number of answered surveys that built the study is already a positive outcome. "These numbers speak for themselves and demonstrate the interest of businessmen and managers from the area in understanding the function of BPM as corporate strategy", he adds. Diagnosis has also revealed interesting conclusions about the stance Brazilian organizations take when it comes to using BPM tools. Among the main aspects it has been found that there's an equally distributed interest among micro, small and large companies, which means BPM is a common need among companies independently of size. "We know there's still this idea that BPM is only useful when you get to a certain company size, but we've realized that this kind of tool is relevant for any kind of company", Wallace points outs.

The areas with the best participation rate were consultancy and software, with well shared participations from other market sectors that are mainly interested in BPM as a way to correctly align their processes with their business strategy. Organizations from the Southeast and south of the country have showed great enthusiasm in the study and have had more participants, followed closely by companies from the Midwest, which were motivated by being closer to the capital of the country, Brasília.

Another important factor discovered with the diagnosis is that companies are not focused only in reducing costs when they adopt BPM tools, but also in improving their products and services through the automation and management of processes. Companies were found to be quite mature when it comes to mapping and documenting processes. However, the lack of automation (execution of workflow within an information system) makes it impossible for companies to have access to management reports or indicators. Therefore, they don't fully control the activities or have the right references in order to improve them. "Even though they are mature when it comes to documentation, a large portion of the companies implement BPM systems in an isolated form, department by department, when they could invest in implementing the system throughout the company, working with their processes in an integrated way and, as a result, optimizing their work as a whole", the executive from Venki Technologies remarks.

Venki Technologies expects this diagnosis to be of great utility for the participant companies. "The study was a success and a lot of people are becoming interested in BPM tools. These people have two goals: they want to automate the processes within the companies and walk towards a workflow design based on the chain of value. We hope that this report serves as an incentive for similar initiatives and as a wake-up call for the use of BPM in these organizations", Wallace concludes.