Business process management is not a new concept. However, software company Savvion, based in Santa Clara, Calif., thinks it’s high time service providers gave it a second look — and analysts seem to agree.

The market for business process management software grew 80% last year to $890 million, IDC said in a recent report, projecting growth to continue over the next five years. By 2011, the BPM market will reach $5.5 billion globally, the research firm said. Companies focused on BPM such as Ascentn, Appian, Bluespring, Global 360, Savvion and Ultimus will join more broadly focused companies such as BEA, IBM, Oracle, Tibco and others in tapping into that market.
 
One of the biggest drivers for better process solutions is consolidation, according to IDC. But the other, made more immediate by the encroachment of Internet-based competition, is developing “a front end for next generation deployment platforms that are used to build custom applications.”
 
Savvion has been providing BPM solutions since 1994 to both the enterprise market and telecom. But telecom is in dire need now, said Sanjay Kumar, vice president of telecommunications solutions for Savvion. To make his point, Kumar has identified five business processes that, if not managed properly, can kill your business.

“The same key pain points keep popping up,” Kumar said. Exacerbating them is the mix of inherited systems over time through acquisition and the increasing number of new product launches, he said.

The first pain point is in order management and service delivery, Kumar said. There is a lot more pressure on service providers to bundle services, but the existing processes and frameworks within companies just can’t keep pace. The second pain point is in network provisioning, or what Kumar said is all the day-to-day activity in managing the network, including inventory and workforce management within and across various groups.

“There are so many parts to a single process that are usually run independently, and that’s where improvements can be found from a cost and delivery time perspective,” Kumar said.

The third area that can kill a business is the non-standard processes behind the order management such as special billing and service level agreements. These processes often vary from customer to customer and service to service. Kumar said his BPM software can manage all these moving parts and get them aligned.

Next comes reverse logistics, better known as repair and replace. This is especially important to wireless operators, which engage in a lot of device issues, but increasingly in wireline broadband services as well. Not streamlining this process can be a real biz kill, Kumar said, especially as more third-party players get involved.

Then there’s the fallout. Exception management — the business of correcting misguided orders, requests or trouble reports — is not only costly, it is very visible to customers and a source of customer disatisfaction.
 
These five pain points are all identified as part of major transformation projects. Many service providers are engaged in some sort of business transformation project. Some, such as BT and Telstra, have been very public. But they don’t have to address everything at once, Kumar said. In fact, IDC also said that most BPM solutions are primarily being installed on a project-by-project basis rather than in the course of a major transformation.

“There is no out-of-the-box solution to all these problems,” Kumar said. Instead, Savvion’s BusinessManager software suite acts as a framework that supports different mechanisms for each process area.

“In provisioning alone, there are a monster number of activities that take place, and those activities have dependencies, which in turn have interdependencies,” Kumar said. “So we have built mechanisms for those dependencies at whatever level of granularity that’s needed.”

No company is immune to these problems, Kumar said. One of the end results of bad processes is that companies don’t have a clear understanding of the profitability of the product or service they are delivering. And this problem is magnified in the current environment of mergers and acquisitions. “How do you give a customer a common look and feel when, behind the scenes, you are really still running as separate companies?” he said. “These things can easily make [your] costs outweigh your revenue.”