Buy Once, Buy Quality
An alternative title could be ’spend a little more to save a lot of money’, and it’s very relevant now when everyone’s personal and business budget is being squeezed. It’s a piece of advice my father gave me about buying tools - don’t buy the cheapest offerings which are made to look like the quality brands, buy the real thing - and in my case I take it a little further and prefer to buy my quality tools at a specialist ‘mom and pop store’. It might cost a few more dollars, but that’s cheap compared to the advice you get in choosing the exact tool for the job, and more importantly the long-term relationship you build up with the store owner.
Visiting and talking to our clients and partners about the correct BPM Suite for their needs often brings up some of the same questions. Yes, there may, on occasions, be cheaper options available which could solve your specific problem, but in a few months time there will be a different problem or process area you need to address, and the cheaper option may no longer meet all of your needs. It may be when you come to consider integration into other systems, or when you realise that the ability to have nested processes would have been useful to have as it gives you the ability to build process libraries which can then be re-used. The single most powerful capability we demonstrate is how a single tool can be used to build out the process, integrate with other systems, configure the alerts and escalations and finally produce the user interface - all within the same environment.
Helping our clients understand the power and breadth of a true enterprise BPM Suite, and the multiple areas within a business where it can be applied, is all part of the client exploration process. The initial focus is normally on solving a few specific process problems, and then expanding them to be enterprise deployments. Whether it’s for a few key departmental processes, or for a business wide BPM platform, it’s an expensive process to select the wrong partner or vendor - my best advice is to buy once and buy quality.
About the author: Manus Savage is the Partner Manager at Singularity, a leading BPM vendor (www.singularity.co.uk).
Tags: BPM, BPM_Suite, Enterprise_BPM