You can buy all the cloud services you like, virtualise the hell out of your application stack, consolidate, outsource and have all your applications written by child code slaves in the Far East at 0.005p a thousand lines. But if you don’t have the underlying business processes right, all you are really doing is gold-plating rubbish, frankly.

Or to quote a great philosopher of IT – who should know a thing or two about what can go wrong – Mr Bill Gates (retd.): "The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency."

This is a very useful maxim and it seems it’s one that’s played on the minds of NEC, a 25,000-strong Japanese networking giant that thinks a complete refresh of its core business processes may take as much as 20% cost out of its international operations by ‘business process excellence’.

In case you are unfamiliar with the term, this is a concept from German software giant Software AG and is all about a combination of standard business process redesign and other techniques. In this instance, the two reckon they can strip out, standardise or repair as much as 80% of international business processes: NEC field sales, for example, reorganised and standardised over 100 business processes down to just 22.

To get 20% savings – which is really a very, very high target – NEC is having to do some real work, of course. It says it will have to carry out a total reorganisation of its mission critical systems in the areas of sales, accounting and purchasing in order to deliver consolidated financial statements faster, greatly improve business efficiency and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for management information systems. It will have to introduce standard business processes across all its operations globally without exception, developed via Business Process Reengineering (BPR) methods in the areas of sales, accounting and purchasing running on an SAP platform.

Along the way, NEC plans to simultaneously strengthen its internal controls and increase the speed of delivering global consolidated financial statements plus move to what it dubs a "total cloud service" for customers, including consulting and business applications. That move alone it thinks may deliver reductions in the TCO of internal systems by over 20%.

Quite a plan – and quite an achievement if it can pull it off. Yes, big companies are always looking to transform processes. But to do so on such a scale and nailing such a big target to the mast of stripping out one in every five yen on operations – that’s worth taking note of.

We can only wish NEC as much luck in its journey as the Japan football team, who also seem to be aiming for the stars – and why not?

Image: Elsie esq., Flickr, CC licence.