13.04.2016

Quality of business processes still with a lot of room for improvement

According to a study by Actinium Consulting, the opportunities for improving process quality and process costs are far from exhausted. Apparently, companies are having great difficulty in their optimization efforts, as only a marginal improvement has emerged over the past three years.

The more than 300 business managers surveyed admitted in the survey that they face major hurdles in the further development of process management. They include an insufficient understanding of processes among both business and IT staff, as well as a low willingness to change and investment constraints. In addition, in every second case there is a lack of an overall strategy for the company.

“Consequently, this means that business areas often go their own ways instead of seeking internal cooperation,” summarizes Actinium Managing Director Klaus Hüttl. Even in the management, there is not enough active support in half of the companies. Yet process orientation is anything but an end in itself; rather, according to two-thirds of business managers, it is necessary solely with a view to improving costs and increasing productivity.

Hüttl attributes this contrast to the fact that many companies have not yet succeeded in reconciling what is required and what is actually done. “On the one hand, great strategic importance is attached to the process issue, but on the other hand, habits and other forces of inertia often prevent a consistent focus.” The fact that there is a concrete need for action is shown by the critical judgment of business managers on the current usefulness of the business processes in their area of responsibility.

After all, 61 percent see considerable scope for optimization in qualitative terms, and a similar number are dissatisfied with process costs. But a large majority also see important potential for improvement in terms of process productivity and transparency, as well as in process modeling. Not even the compliance topic feels half of the respondents sufficiently mapped, even worse it stands around the process integration.

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“Companies with such ratios are hardly sufficiently fit for the future in view of the increasing need for digitization of processes,” Hüttl judges. In the near future, highly automated and transparent processes will be even more important than before. But this is precisely where things have changed since 2013, with the level of digitization rising from 40 percent to 53 percent. On the other hand, there is still a lack of sufficient integration capability of business processes, although this aspect is also of great importance for the digital future.