5 Major Problems SMEs Face in Terms of Management and BPM

Start-ups and SMEs face some important problems due to their size.

Start-ups and SMEs face some important problems due to their size. For them, technology and people may be too expensive and they need both to do BPM. They never thought about it when they was a start-up so now its harder.

Most of them don’t have managers who can manage BPs. They’ve never had. Their founders never was able to as well.

Those managers don’t know even how to be BP owners. BPI and QA is even more hard to do, because they can’t afford a QA office, a BPM office, etc.

Technology can be a problem as well. It’s expensive too.

So, what do they face?

1 — Lack of business people on the board of founders — Most of the start-ups founders have nice ideas and some of them can create a quite good business model, but when they manage, they do as they feel, keeping business methods away. Tech start-ups, for example, think user experience of their software is the only thing that really matters. When you start like that, your company will have difficulties to go through CMM levels and they will face the 2 situations below.

2 — Tacit process-oriented management or no process at all — Some SMEs are process-oriented. Some of them also say that they are client-oriented and that’s very good. However it’s too tacit, because they don’t implement BPM methods while they’re small and simple. They just make their teams process-oriented or product-oriented, I mean, there’s a XYZ Product team, but it just sounds like BPM, it’s not really BPM. We don’t have BPM, BPI and QA while we don’t really implement the method, starting from company strategy. (Product Managers, for example, should know that. Product management should be BPM.)

Of course, those small companies maybe know what a process is, and that’s a start, but when a start-up doesn’t know what a process is, the problem is bigger, because in the future the transition will be harder.

3 — BPI is impossible without BPM — Many SMEs, those who have a tacit process-oriented culture, want process improvement. The problem is: they don’t have BPM, so they don’t have process owners, they don’t have process rules, they don’t have modeled process, they don’t have KPIs. Conclusion: BPI is impossible.

4 — Technology and business people are expensive for SMEs — Imagine a start-up that don’t have business people on the board of founders. They think business methods is not a problem now and they only think about company’s product. So production will have nice engineers and nice managers. Now, it’s not a start-up anymore, it’s a small to medium-sized company. BPM is now a requirement. So, the CEO, board of directors, executive managers, operative managers, everybody should learn BPM and business methods. They also must start a QA office or BPM office. They should buy technology, as well.

Then it’s expensive, because it was not started when they was a start-up. So $$$ is another thing to face. Of course it’s an investment, however keeping business methods away may be a established habit now.

5 — Culture — Business methods are just fancy things for many SMEs (read problem 1). So many of them will face this culture for years: the culture of “domestic administration”. Actually, there are lots of big companies like that. Some of them wait years until their death.