„Obviously there are many solutions out there advertising brilliant process execution, finding the “right” one turns out to be a tricky task.“ – Interview with Fritz Ulrich, Process Development Specialist

Fritz graduated with a Bachelors of Information Systems at WWU Münster in 2013 and since then has been working for Duni GmbH in the area of Process Development (responsible for all kinds of BPM topics and Duni’s BPM framework) and as a Project Manager.

What does your day to day look like?

The only thing that all work days have in common is a cup of coffee in the morning – there really is no fixed schedule. My work is project driven and includes management of all kinds of process improvement projects, aligning Business and IT requirements and to develop our process management organization. The good thing is, it never gets boring!

Why is a BPM software important for your business?

Being an international company we have several sites which historically developed their own ways of working. By implementing global IT systems we streamlined many processes. Yet we still found a good number of processes not fully covered by the systems or spanning across several systems. By implementing a BPM solution we aim to cover these processes, make them transparent and to steer them in the best way possible.

What functionalities are most important to you in good BPM software?

Business Process Management software enables us to be more reliable for our customers. This translates into requirements such as:

• Business requirements
  • user friendly solutions
  • transparency
  • supporting a broad range of processes
  • ability to adapt processes following market changes
  • the possibility to include customers
• IT requirements:
  • easy to maintain and develop
  • availability of developer resources on the market
  • scalability
  • performance
  • security

What advice would you give other Process Development Specialists who are evaluating a BPM software?

Obviously there are many solutions out there advertising brilliant process execution, finding the “right” one turns out to be a tricky task. Clear requirements and involvement of the business helps a lot when evaluating these solutions.

Internally you should discuss how you want to use BPM software and clarify the following questions:

• Do you plan to embed the BPM software in your existing software applications or do you want to have a new application?
• Do you plan to use the software within a specific area or do you plan to use it on a broader scale?
• How many users do you want to include? How important are standards such as BPMN for your company?

Be critical when looking at presentations – many solutions may look great from a user perspective and promise “no code” but offer very limited flexibility and are hard to develop. Ask how much you can develop yourself and which skills you’ll need in your IT department to develop and maintain the solution. Check the license cost per user and what users are allowed to do with a license. Different use cases can have a big impact on the cost of the solution.

As the BPM market is developing quickly consider supplier reliability. Are there other companies supporting the solution or offering consulting? Who uses the software and is there an active community? How fast will you get support?

Some solutions have a really active community – Join a community meeting and don’t be afraid to ask your questions – It helps a lot to listen to the experience of the community working with the solution.

Once you found some promising candidates use a test version to develop a first process. It’ll give you a good impression of the pros and cons of the solution.

What do you hope BPM software can do for you in the future?

From a business side we believe it will enable us to be closer and more reliable to our customers and to adapt our ways of working following changes in the market in a faster pace. From an IT perspective we are looking forward to have one tool that we can use to support various parts of the business and to increase transparency.

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