As I reflect on my days working for a Fortune 500 company, I realize now how beneficial BPM software would have been to that kind of business and to my own individual success. My days at the company involved many long frustrating hours producing manual work while running into consistent bottlenecks.

In my sales and marketing position, one of the responsibilities I dealt with was handling 100+ distributor contracts, compensations and co-op marketing accounts.  This involved heavy paperwork and workflows. Work was performed manually, utilizing Excel spreadsheets and Access databases to complete ad hoc reports and more.

I remember one specific case every month, the distributors within the network were entitled to subsidies. In order to process those I had to pull ad hoc reports from an Access database then analyze, print and route them to the designated personnel for approvals in various departments including our own. Since this was all performed manually, paperwork was regularly lost and distributor subsidy payments were consistently late sometimes months behind.

Looking back now, if I had access to a BPM Platform at the time, I would have simply created and customized my business workflow, with the appropriate users and activities.  All of the users would have then logged into the same platform, submitted their reviews and approvals, and the system would have kept the process flowing and alerted users to ensure adequate response times and accuracy. A BPM implementation would have helped optimize and improve communication, productivity, accuracy and time.