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photo, Craig Schiff
Let's look at a real company choosing a BPM vendor and see how it works in the real world. Novamex, a leading marketer of branded Mexican food and beverage products in the U.S., manages numerous top brands using its nationwide network of more than 50,000 distribution points.
Last year, CEO Luis Fernandez asked project leader Karla Legaspy to find a budgeting and reporting tool to upgrade its Excel-centric methodology and supplement its general ledger. At the time, Novamex's C-level team had to wait until the end of the month for reports; and while a basic balanced scorecard was in use, it was posted on a bulletin board and only updated sporadically. Legaspy described the analytic system at 400-person Novamex as "walk around and ask everybody." She headed a task force, which began by researching on the Internet and talking to peers at other companies. Some of those peers knew little of reporting software and were stretching Excel to handle budgeting and reporting. Others were already using industrial-strength reporting systems.
"By talking to the major...