Making the Business Case for Managed Services

So many projects, so little time and resources.  How do you as a business process owner fulfill your charter to drive productivity and efficiency, when you have to queue your project up and gain support from IT and other internal teams?  Like you, IT, dev ops, cloud ops and other support teams have their own long, prioritized  list of projects and requests from multiple teams across your organization.  We’ve been asked many times over the years for advice, guidance, and tips to “make the case” for managed services – and so, here is a short synopsis of how to make  the business case for managed services so you can  get your ‘to do list’ done.

Managed Services, Revisited

Most business process professionals and IT teams know what managed services are, given the outsourcing of IT and infrastructure started back in the 80’s and 90’s, and surged in adoption as the number of SaaS platforms flourished over the similar time frame.  But, like SaaS platforms, managed services offerings have advanced well beyond standard maintenance and high availability uptime to now include a range of valuable programs that historically would have been additionally charged services:

1. Extended & Preferential Support: Vendors investing in managed services offerings now offer global support across chat, email, phone, fax, and social channels, many now 24x7x365.  Certain vendors provide clients with dedicated communications channels (like Slack), priority queuing in support channels, text-based status notifications, and direct access to  named support managers to ensure the highest level of service and  response.
2. Dedicated Teams:  Managed services today typically come with fractional or, if desired, full-time support leads such as a Support Engineer, Customer Success Manager, or Technical Account manager to ensure coverage, continuity, with continuous communications, onboarding and training on new releases. Quarterly business reviews are typical to evaluate metrics and overall account progress.
3. Dedicated Knowledge Portals & Learning Centers: Investing in managed services, opens up access to a content and educational materials not made available to the wider customer base. The provider’s knowledge portal or learning center can house technical documentation, release notes, how-to videos, persona-based learning journeys, certification programs, APIs,  and other content  Many knowledge portals have very helpful self-service capabilities if your CSM or TAM is not immediately available.
4. Maintenance, Updates, Upgrades and Monitoring:  Your managed services investment will of course ensure consistent uptime, ongoing  updates and upgrades but it also offers a host of performance, compliance and security monitoring tools that provide real-time insights to the status and health of your SaaS platform.  Your dedicated support team helps set up monitoring frequency, cadence and method of communication so your operation runs efficiently, securely and smoothly.

The Five Proof Points for Managed Services

So now that you know all the valuable programs that come with managed services, you may still have to prove the value to internal teams or senior management.  To help you make the case, I’ve highlighted five convincing proof points that our own customers have shared with me which I hope will help you:

1. Responsiveness to Stakeholders: The backbone of most successful businesses is operational excellence, and business process owners are chartered to continually improve efficiency and productivity through people, processes and platforms.  By utilizing a vendor’s managed services, internal stakeholders will have minimal disruption, have an always-available dedicated go-to team, and have the confidence any issues that arise are not back-logged or queued behind other internal priorities.  Outsourcing managed services for critical business systems like Business Process Automation ensure high availability and high responsiveness to the stakeholders so they can focus on other projects to optimize the business.
2. Access to Expertise: Business process automation requires a certain level of expertise that only comes from managing hundreds of projects and thousands of processes. When investing  in managed services, you are hiring a team of experts with specialized skills that you may not have inhouse, cannot afford to hire, or simply just don’t have the time to find given the pressures of the business.
3. Cost Savings: While managed services do come with associated fees and costs, the price is usually far smaller than hiring dedicated, specialized development personnel. Some customers also quantify the cost of lost opportunity of not getting key projects done as a means to cost-justify investment in managed services.  It is also worth noting that managed services frees organizations from cloud infrastructure costs, optimization tools, and any costly fines resulting from non-compliance.
4. Increased Productivity:  By outsourcing your BPA projects via managed services, you and your  teams can focus on other top priorities, align core competencies to other projects, and execute on the most important strategic initiatives. Managed services lets you and your IT teams best align your few  resources to the most important projects.
5. Risk Mitigation: There is much comfort and security in knowing your managed services provider  is the single “point” for business continuity, disaster recovery, security, compliance, and industry best practices.  The regulatory climate is continually changing, so having a dependable go-to expert that manages your BPA platform holistically helps ensure you have reduced risk in your organization.

Conclusion

With years of experience in BPA, we’ve noticed that our most successful customers always include managed services in their BPA strategy. This strategy involves swiftly identifying and addressing customer needs, deploying solutions quickly, and continuously optimizing performance to maximize benefits. While many automation platforms are good and reliable with decent service and support, ProcessMaker goes the extra mile. We keep expanding our managed services to make sure our customers enjoy quick results, boosted productivity, and cost savings, all while reducing risk and hitting key business goals.  If you are interested in our managed services offering, or any other program from our range of client services, feel free to contact us to get started.