As BPM takes hold in business, and BPM suites and tools proliferate, making a decision on which BPM solution is best for you and your business may not be simple.
If you will be evaluating potential solutions for your specific needs via a proposal process, what should you be asking for?
Some of us here at BonitaSoft have learned our way around RFPs, both issuing and responding to – from big government projects to small vendor contracts, with an assortment of oddball experiences in between.
In our collective wisdom*, we’ve learned that an RFP that requires short descriptive paragraphs as the response to a series of questions is harder to respond to, harder to evaluate quickly – and proves better information with which to evaluate well.
We’ve taken our collective wisdom and developed an RFP guideline that consists of a series of questions to ask of, or about, a BPM suite provider. It may not be exhaustive, but it’s a pretty good basic set of questions that require essay-type responses, with examples – not a simple set of yes-no checkmarks. "Yes/no" checklists are easy to score, but may not provide the best information to evaluate a BPMS. This set of questions suggests that you can evaulate on:
- Architecture and scalability
- Installation and development environment
- Use of standards
- User interface for tasks
- Human task assignment and delegation
- User experience
- Integration
- Business rules
- Business Activity Monitoring and operational analytics
- Openness
- Support and maintenance
- Education and training
- Pricing
Consider the “BPMS Buyer’s Kit: Sample Request for Proposal” as a model and tell us what you think. Was it / would it be helpful to evaluate the key distinctions between available offerings? In your own experience, have you found other key questions that have helped your decision-making process?
* Yes, that wisdom, as in what you get when you learn from your mistakes!
