How to Maximise the Value of Your Business Process Change Investments
Logica and the Economist Intelligence Unit lifts the lid on the impact of business process change
It’s vital for businesses to keep updating the way they work. To adapt to dynamic market conditions and stay in tune with their customers’ needs.
Defining success: winners and losers
Business process change is a means to an end. It’s not the goal itself. Its objective is to improve the performance of a company so that it can generate additional value for its stakeholders. It turned out in this survey that we are mainly talking about financial value. Sixty-six percent of our executives put ‘improve financial performance’ in their top-3 of main drivers for business process change.
Because we’re talking about value in terms of finance, we can use EBITDA as a suitable indicator for success. We were able to define two groups:
- High Performers - their EBITDA had grown 20% or more over the last 3 years (111 respondents)
- Low Performers - no change to, or a decline in, EBITDA over the last 3 years (47 respondents).
Factors that restrain successful process change
Large scale change projects can be time consuming, complex and costly. They have to be undertaken alongside normal business. So it’s not surprising that there are many reasons why projects are not successfully completed. In fact 37% of our group said they had abandoned a major business change project in the past 3 years. Take a look a some of the most common reasons for failure:
- Pressures of day to day business (48%)
- Lack of dedicated resources (38%)
- Lack of collaboration between functions (38%)
- Lack of support from senior management (15%)
- Poor planning (16.3%)
- Lack of necessary IT/ infrastructure/applications (22%)
- Lack of expertise in business process design and / or change management (21%)
Critical Success Factors
Having analysed the different approaches of Winners and Losers, these are the most critical success
factors for any project.
- Pro-activeness
- Level of ambition
- Project based approach of business process change
- Use of IT
- Collaboration and openness
- Critical skills
- Use of external experts/skills
- Performance assessment
