Published on the 29/10/2015 | Written by Newsdesk

One in three NZ organisations plan to increase investment in BPM in next three years…

While new research indicates that investment in business process management is on the up in New Zealand, it also shows that resource constraints and a lack of time are limiting the benefits. While the majority of organisations do report improvements, most also acknowledge there is still much work to be done. Indeed, more than half (52 percent) New Zealand public sector organisations say that few to none of their processes are even documented.

However, the prospect of future investment in BPM appears strong with 37 percent of businesses indicating they plan to increase their spending in the next three years.

The research, conducted during July by TNS Global on behalf of Promapp, drew respondents from 620 organisations in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

Asked to identify the top barriers to process improvement today, 56 percent of New Zealand respondents pinpointed low staff numbers compared to an average of 40 percent across all regions. The research also found that the majority of organisations do not have fundamental process governance roles and 36 percent do not have ‘process owners’.

At the same time, 58 percent of New Zealand organisations overall and 68 percent of New Zealand public sector organisations claim lack of time is a barrier to implementing and managing BPM efforts. Just 39 percent of organisations in the US and 53 percent of businesses in Australia claim lack of time as an issue in implementing and managing business process improvement efforts.

Within both public and private sectors, 83 percent of respondents believe BPM plays an important or very important role in helping them to meet organisational goals. 86 percent of New Zealand companies believe that BPM plays an important or very important role in helping meet their organisational goals. This number jumps to 92 percent for the New Zealand manufacturing and construction industries with their heightened focus on quality and improvement.

The top three benefits of BPM identified by New Zealand business include improved staff efficiency, enablement of consistent service delivery and improved customer satisfaction.

“The results are encouraging, however they show there is still plenty of work to be done,” said Promapp CEO Ivan Seselj. “While BPM is achieving key benefits in both the public and private sectors, there are clearly ways in which these could be extended even further.”

He said the research also found that the benefits achieved from BPM by public-sector organisations outweighed those in the private sector. Of the survey group, 82 percent of public-sector organisations said BPM had helped to improve staff efficiency, compared with 72 percent of private-sector respondents.

“The research has identified that there is still a lot of room for improvement when it comes to getting the most value from BPM initiatives,” Seselj added. “Within many organisations the fundamentals are just not there. Process owners, a governance structure and more visible leadership are essential ingredients for success. Organisations which consider their processes to be “best practice” are more likely to have internal process owners, an agreed process governance structure and a Chief Process Officer.”

Download the free BPM research white paper.