Publications

Business Productivity - Riding the Next Wave

By Ted Drysdale, President and CEO of NexPrise, Inc.

As we close the year, we're beginning to see a few positive indicators for our economy. Most notably, the U.S. Labor Department has reported that non-farm business productivity grew at a 4 percent seasonally adjusted annual rate in the third quarter. More output per employee suggests that company profits are growing even as organizations minimize both their own expenses and costs to their customers. And that's good news for all of us.

Still we could be doing a lot more to drive the wave of productivity higher. Even if our employees are operating at peak performance, too often our business processes are not. That is because many processes - internally and with customers and suppliers - remain largely manual, linked by a hodge-podge of faxes, e-mail, spreadsheets, conference calls and Fed-Ex packages.

In analyzing the costs of process inefficiency with manufacturers, we've determined that one process alone can cost companies up to $600,000 in unnecessary expenses due to longer cycle times, information management overhead, project management efforts, communications cycles, and delayed response times.

Similarly, consider the findings of Rajiv D. Banker and Indranil R. Bardhan1 in their paper entitled, "Evaluating the Impact of Collaborate Product Commerce on the Product Development Lifecycle." Companies reported to Banker and Bardhan that the annual cost savings in product data management during a collaborative product commerce solution's first full year of operation was between $100,000 and $1 million, depending on the size of the company and scope of CPC implementation. (For more information on the white paper, you can write to Mr. Bardhan at bardhan@utdallas.edu.)

Now take the potential savings related to automating a single business process and multiply it by the many processes that drive your critical operations each and every day. When you do the math, it's no wonder that business process automation is the current topic of talk with both business and information technology managers.

But talk only goes so far; results require action. Fortunately, the large, upfront BPA investments that have sometimes inhibited action are yesterday's news. A new generation of Web-enabled, modular BPA solutions let you quickly automate a process and see results as early as a few weeks after the initial ramp-up. So the potential exists to turn a five-figure investment in automating one process into a six-figure savings. With a return on investment of this scale, the time to start using BPA technology to ride the next wave in productivity is now.

1Rajiv D. Banker and Indranil R. Bardhan, "Evaluating the Impact of Collaborate Product Commerce on the Product Development Lifecycle," The PRISM Center at the University of Texas at Dallas.