Business Process Management for Newbies

Business Process Management Defined

Business process management (BPM) is defined by TechTarget as a systematic approach to making an organization’s workflow more effective, efficient and capable of adapting to an ever changing environment. Your average entrepreneur is not typically a “process” person so it’s fair to say that companies aren’t choosing to focus on BPM until they are told to do so by an investor or until they are feeling some type of pain. It stands to reason that companies would be in a later stage before they would choose to integrate a BPM solution. But what if they didn’t wait?

Leveraging Stories

Christine Custis, CEO of NewPearl, is a long time practitioner of BPM. She has spent 18 years consulting to large organizations to identify and remedy business processes that impact a company’s bottom line. She knows from her experience that the first step is to analyze the various business processes so that vulnerabilities and opportunities can be identified. Once the business processes have been dissected, consultants need a way of tracking progress and that’s where BPM software tools come in. Christine knows from implementing BPM software that the process is arduous. It requires the participation of the entire senior management team and training on the proper use of the tool is always necessary. “In the beginning of an engagement, the vast majority of a consultant’s time is spent helping an organization learn the language and use the tools so baselines can be established. That really means telling the business story.” Typically the organization has to dedicate internal resources as subject matter/implementation experts to make sure the story is told properly. Christine believes that if companies had a way to tell their business story without having to speak a new language and hire consultants, they would willingly leverage BPM tools. She has set out to solve this problem with a natural language software solution that easily lets a company tell their business story without the need for consultants, training or software downloads. She is taking the leap into entrepreneurship and her software product is in the customer validate stage. Feedback from potential investors has been positive and they have compared her to companies like HubSpot or Slack which also have taken a complicated process and broken it down into easy-to-digest chunks that lead a company through a process they used to have to hire high-priced consultants to perform.

Stealing Best Practices

With vulnerabilities identified, BPM consultants move into the phase of applying innovative solutions that are often proven methods borrowed from other industries. Since young businesses often struggle with a similar set of issues, it’s reasonable to anticipate the solutions and prompt a company through a customizable process. “I’ve been around long enough to have seen trends in business at different stages. A slight variation on an innovative idea that makes it relevant to a particular sector is what’s called for” says Christine. That’s why she named her company New Pearl. “Issues like onboarding, scaling, technical support, customer acquisition, customer satisfaction are pretty standard for new companies.”

Value Proposition

New Pearl’s value proposition is to use internet software to make BPM self-paced. It helps a company use natural language to get to a customized business process model. The software will apply an “efficiency score” that establishes the baseline for improvement. Then the software leads the company through potential solutions based on proven success in related industries. The idea is that, as with any software tool that relies on algorithms, the more companies that use the product, the better it will become at both the natural language capability and the recommendation of solutions. “Our software is democratizing the process improvement activity” says Christine.

Competing Against Non-Consumption

Christine admits that this is a crowded space. Her experience has led her to this place where she knows what can be replicated, what should be customized and what can be automated.

Because New Pearl is targeting earlier stage companies, she knows that her product needs to be easy to use and show an early return. She plans to facilitate an entire senior management team to collaborate on the process by establishing one fee for any number of users vs. the per-user pricing structure that is typical in BPM. Christine says “My idea is to make sure that companies get introduced early to the concept of BPM. I believe that’s likely if we make it easy and low risk. We even plan to go so far as to make their data exportable so companies can integrate into another BPM software tool.”

Currently, NewPearl is working with a team of customer validation experts to refine the Pearlo™ tool and how it is perceived by potential users. The team wants to make sure that the narration of a firm’s current process happens in a way that is most comfortable to the user and is delivered to the tool in a way that makes the most sense to the people involved in the process improvement activity. Once the conversation begins around the story of the process, the tool can do the rest.

Pearlo™ is especially interested in talking with prospective investors and/or companies who would like to be beta testers. Contact them at ccustis@yahoo.com.