What is “Consulting” BPM Adoption Model for BPM Processes deployment?

As commented in one of ours recent posts, by "BPM Adoption" we understand the way that some organizations have undertaken to relieve, optimize, automate and outsource part of their business processes, with the ultimate aim of achieving and maintaining the Operational Excellence that ensure them a sustainable competitive advantage.

To simplify our analysis, we have grouped the various strategies of BPM Adoption usually followed by organizations in four archetypal models, which we have called "Process Team", "Cloud", "Consulting" and "BPaaS".

Each model is characterized by the decision organizations have made in terms of the Mode of Development of the automation solutions, differentiating whether they do or plan to do by internal or external means; and the Mode of Operation of such automation solutions, differentiating if they do or plan to do either on internal systems (on-premises) or external (on Cloud or on an external Data Centre).

The “Consulting” model we analyze in this post is similar to the “Process Team”BPM Adoption Model already analyzed in a previous publication, but characterized by customers transferring the responsibility of development to an external actor, the Consulting Company.

Then, we categorize under this “Consulting” model to these organizations that choose the External Development Mode, by delegating this responsibility to an external actor having a Business Consultancy, Implementer and/or Integrator profile; and that applies the Internal Exploitation Mode of the developed applications operating them on internal infrastructure and platform resources, just as in the model "Process Team" mentioned above. This model is described in the next figure:

In this “Consulting” model, the main external actor o actors are the Consultant, Implementer and/or Integrator companies contracted by the Client for the execution of the project and, the main project vectors are the business knowledge and the technology skills that have one or more of such companies.

Often the project scope is split between more than one external companies, each of them having specific profiles of the three methodology/technology specialties required: business consultancy, Implementation of automation solutions on BPMS Platforms and integration of these solutions with the corporate applications.

Risk and responsibility for the development of the project are on the external company (ies) side, although the Client follows the project very closely with its own business and IT people.

Some BPMS vendors tread this ground to their distributors (these ones usually called "partners"), making this development work and implementation directly to their end customers, especially when it comes to large companies or corporations or the BPMS vendors are small-mid size in the first stage of their product/business development.

As consultancy companies and, especially, implementers and integrators chosen by the customer to perform the BPM project cannot master all the 400+ BPMS technologies available, the market supplying BPM business consulting and technology services is fragmented by BPMS Platforms.

The BPMS Platform on which to implement automation solutions, is either selected by the customer and from this derive the Consultant / Implanter chosen (either the same BPMS Vendor or one partner belonging to the BPMS Vendor ecosystem) or customer selects the Consultant/Implanter and from this derives the BPMS Platform, among the ones Consultant/Implanter is capable to support (usually no more than two or three).

Under this BPM Adoption Model project costs are very high and often extra-costs appears, either by insufficient prior definition of the project, either by the difficulty of configuring these tools or their functional weaknesses and, in large part, by changes on the initial customer’s thoughts or new process improvement ideas that arise as a consequence of the process optimization exercise done during the course of the project.

Therefore, this “Consulting” model has similar or even higher CAPEX (CAPital EXpenses) and the same OPEX (OPerational EXpenses) than the “Process Team”BPM Adoption Model.

In this regard, we believe that standardization and reusability of BPM automation solutions will be critical issues in the future so that implantation and integration companies could to be more competitive in their BPM projects.