Introduction (What and Why)

The recent financial crisis and economic downturn has shown that there is a great need for a properly resilient and robust financial/banking system. This need for stability has prompted the banking industry to undergo drastic changes. Financial firms are adjusting business operations in order to be compliant with increased regulatory demands. Naturally, this adjustment has led to higher operating costs. Falling profits associated with this regulatory squeeze can be ameliorated by strategic adherence to cost cutting methodologies – namely Business Process Management (BPM), Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), and Business Intelligence (BO).     

What do can you do when process improvement is needed and there is no executive sponsor available?

Has Lean delivered its full promise to date? Observing the evolution of the “Lean Thinking” concept in the past 30 years in North America is very interesting. A few years back,  the (yet another new) term “LEAN” was coined and brought forth, which I found fit perfectly in describing the main thrust of the philosophy and what the driving methodology was intended to achieve. 

As business process management understanding matures within organizations, new challenges will arise. Sometimes it helps to know how other disciplines have addressed similar issues as it avoids the “reinventing the wheel” syndrome. For the last decade forward thinking organizations have conducted reviews of their business processes and taken steps to streamline them, i.e., minimize the “handoffs” between business units. For publicly traded companies, Sarbanes-Oxley has increased the complexity of business processes and prevented the streamlining of certain processes.

A Prominent factor of international business today is its strategic direction.  Global firms are competing with a wider variety of business and operational strategies and with more complex operational strategies today compare to 12 years before.

This makes more challenging for global operation to deploy same model for its internal business where economic and market conditions are different. This can resolved by providing a unique national strategy and dedicated modification of key activities for each major country; this facilitates customizing the business around each countries market.

A global business and operational strategy world is considered as signal market where corporate goals are common. This brings international operations to tough spot of performing as stand-alone entity.