Business Process Maturity’s Effect on Performance

Abstract

Recent adoption of the Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM) by the Object Management Group (OMG) provides a means for managers to benchmark and monitor business processes as well as a roadmap for process improvement. The expectation is that as maturity increases, the result is a positive impact on performance; however, little empirical research has examined to what extent, if any process maturity has on performance. We conduct a survey of manufacturing firms to study the effects of process maturity on performance for two boundary spanning processes: purchasing and order fulfillment. Our results indicate that organizations with more mature purchasing processes appear to have higher relative levels of efficiency process outcomes than those with less mature purchasing processes. Similarly more mature order fulfillment processes do appear to have higher relative levels of quality process outcomes than those with less mature order fulfillment processes.