Those who wish to steer clear of dangerous obstacles during these stormy times need reliable navigation instruments. But cost metrics by themselves are not sufficient for navigating and managing processes and business performance. Our BPM vision focuses on using IT to control process flows.

In recent decades, information technology has precipitated sweeping changes in business process management. Once the challenge was to gather enough data to make an informed decision. Now, COOs are bombarded by data, and need to pinpoint the salient facts and figures, and interpret them correctly.

COOs require business metrics -- but also process and IT metrics. These include, for instance, data on IT usage, structures, stability, risks, scalability and adaptability -- in short, information that aids analysis and monitoring. BPM is often touted as a new way of engineering and optimizing processes – by supplementing purely quantitative financial and profitability analysis with quantitative, non-monetary metrics. These might include turn-around times, service levels, or information on customers, partners and products. How much truth is there to this?

You can only manage, what you can measure

First and foremost, you need the right measurement strategy. We recommend first taking stock of your processes and how they are being used right now. Do you know how your processes are actually executed? Are you familiar with all points and participants in your process chains? Take a closer look at the degree of usage and statistics for processes and transactions.

You can examine SAP production systems from a business standpoint. Track and evaluate usage, enhancements, customizing, master and process data along the reference structures.

Once you have identified the processes, adapt your business intelligence tools – so that your metrics actually reflect what is happening in the system. Address the following issues: What are the business-relevant values in each process? How do you rate costs, value-added and profit?

The next step is continuous improvement. But BPM can only provide the methodology and tools. The solutions and metrics that best suit your business will depend on your specific organization. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Accelerating processes may be one enterprise's key to success but counterproductive for another.

As a result it is difficult to define a single standard strategy for implementation, but one thing is certain: your measurement approach must undergo cycles of alignment and realignment. And it's important to gather quantitative, non-monetary data to track and boost process efficiency.

Look at exceptions for clues

Special attention should be paid to "exceptions" in the process flow, as these can yield important insights. Isolate and closely examine exceptional cases at the very outset.

We believe organizations that deploy BPM to engineer, control and improve their business processes are fundamentally taking the right approach. But they must make a sustained effort to regularly align their BPM and measurement mechanisms to suit the enterprise's situation and strategy. Only then can a COO be sure of having the right data for decision-making. An essential component of BPM is intelligent process analysis – with the aim of achieving continuous optimization, accurate quantification, and learning from problems.