When a leadership team says “we need to improve our processes”, everyone in the room agrees, and everyone means something different. Sales hears faster quotes. Operations hears fewer escalations. Finance hears tighter controls. HR hears better onboarding. Each view is valid. Together they are unmanageable.
That was the starting point for a business process management (BPM) diagnostic for a specialty-ingredients business operating across APAC. The brief was broad. The value came from turning it into a small number of priorities the whole enterprise could stand behind.
Why opinions don’t settle priorities
In most organisations, priorities are negotiated. The loudest function, the latest crisis or the most senior sponsor wins. The result is a portfolio of initiatives that each make sense locally and together overload the organisation.
What changes the conversation is a fact base everyone trusts: evidence gathered systematically, from enough voices, against a common structure.
Three ingredients of a trusted fact base
1. A common language for the work
We mapped end-to-end processes against the APQC Process Classification Framework. A shared classification sounds bureaucratic, but it does something important: people from different functions can describe the same work in the same terms, so problems can be compared instead of argued about.
2. Enough voices to see the pattern
We gathered more than 200 stakeholder inputs across functions. This was not a popularity poll. It was coverage. The people closest to the work see failure points that never reach a steering committee, and when the same issue surfaces from different functions, it stops being one person’s complaint and becomes a system issue.
3. A maturity lens
We assessed process maturity so each area could be seen as a stage of development with a realistic next step, not simply as “good” or “bad”. That keeps recommendations grounded: no organisation jumps from ad hoc to optimised in one program.
From noise to five priorities
With the evidence structured this way, prioritisation became a conversation rather than a negotiation. The diagnostic converged on five enterprise priorities:
- customer relationship
- supply chain
- manufacturing
- knowledge management
- people and talent
Each priority traced back to the evidence behind it, so leaders could see why it mattered and what it would take.
Lessons for any leadership team
- Structure before solutions. Agree how the work is described before debating what to fix.
- Listen wider than feels comfortable. Coverage across functions is what turns anecdotes into patterns.
- Assess maturity, not just performance. It tells you the realistic next step.
- Make the line from evidence to priority visible. People back priorities they can trace to what they told you.
- Keep the list short. Five priorities an enterprise believes in beat twenty it tolerates.
Where AI fits
The same discipline applies to AI. A trusted picture of how work actually flows is the best starting point for deciding where AI will create value (see Start with work, then apply AI). AI can now speed up parts of a diagnostic, such as synthesising large volumes of stakeholder input, but the judgement about what matters still belongs to leaders who have seen the evidence.
