In this Process People interview we welcome Farrukh Humayun, vice president of information services at National City.  Farrukh was instrumental in the launch of the BPM initiative at National City, which is one of the nation’s largest financial holding companies.  In this interview, Farrukh discusses some of the challenges he faced when engaging the business, how he worked through those challenges, as well as providing some of his thoughts on funding a BPM initiative at the project and program levels.

Process People: What challenges have you seen engaging the business during the project and how have you tried to get the business more engaged in the projects themselves?

Farrukh Humayun: There have been lots of challenges. The first one is that the business is not completely aware of exactly what Business Process Management means. They don’t think in terms of managing their processes – they think in terms of managing functions or in terms of managing transactions and they also talk in terms of managing data. But it doesn’t take them long to start thinking or becoming more process-focused. Having visual tools which model the process up-front and get the business thinking about a process flow are also very helpful.

We also found challenges in getting agreement from the business to say what the actual process was, what were the quantifiable business objectives that they were trying to achieve, what were the service level agreements (SLA’s) that they wanted to build inside the actual process. It was also difficult, at first, to get agreement on who on the business side was going to be accountable for which activity or which sub-process within the overall process.

Process People: What do you see as the main challenges and difficulties of implementing a BPM project in a bank? What is it about Financial Services that adds obstacles or makes it easier?

Farrukh Humayun: Banks are very conservative in nature because we want to make sure every process and system that we implement is very secure, customer-centric and complies with all the regulations such as internal audit regulations as well as external regulations. The challenge that we see in a bank environment is that there are lots of stakeholders involved and getting all of them to agree on what the quantifiable business objectives of managing a process are going to be can be challenging.

Also, historically, banks grow by acquisition and some of the lines of business are fairly autonomous. So when we say that National City had over 370 systems for our lending systems alone, those were all one good idea at a time, and that can pose a lot of challenges for people who are trying to build a process across multiple systems where people are used to doing things one way or another.

Process People: When you get into a BPM project do you simply implement the base process as it exists and expect the optimization to happen later, over time, or do you try to optimize the process as much as you can as you build the initial project?

Farrukh Humayun: We have actually done both. I am of the firm opinion that the sooner you get started with a BPM initiative, even though your process is not optimized; the better it will be because you will have data sooner that can help you optimize your process.

We had a paper-based procurement process to get a laptop, and in one case it took months for them to figure out what went wrong with their process. In fact, it took 9 people to touch a requisition for us and pull a laptop. As soon as they saw a pictorial representation of the bad process, they immediately began questioning the value of their existing processes and started thinking about how to do things differently. You cannot optimize what you cannot see. Certainly the best way to do it is to optimize your processes first, but sometimes that can take so long and the business does not have the appetite for that.

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Last week, Tech Decisions For Insurance published a case study covering the use of Lombardi Teamworks at Xbridge, the UK’s leading online insurance and finance broker.  The article is very thorough, and covers some of the ways that BPM is helping Xbridge manage the tremendous growth that they have experienced since being founded in 2000.

In the article, you will be able to see how Xbridge has improved their processes to add value and efficiency to the business.  Specifically, CIO David Brakoniecki talks about how BPM has aided him in improving processes within Xbridge’s call center, and ultimately enables them to increase efficiency and consistency in customer service because they have much more visibility into their business. The full article can be found here.

You can read even more about what Xbridge is doing with BPM to weather the economic turmoil and maintain their market position here.

Yesterday SearchCIO and Accenture published a new webcast with Bob Shallow, who is the Director of Global Product Development Processes, Systems and Operations at NACCO Material Handling Group, a $2.8 billion dollar company that engineers and manufactures Hyster and Yale Material Handling Equipment (lift trucks, aftermarket parts, etc.).

NACCO is also a Lombardi customer, and you can read more about them here.

In the webcast Bob talks about what exactly has been accomplished using BPM at NACCO, demonstrating an architectural step-through of how their processes have changed, with a particular focus on ROI. It’s exciting that so many Lombardi customers like NACCO are passionate about their BPM successes and want to share their best practices.

You’ll need to register on the SearchCIO site to view the webcast.

Founded in 1899, the Tillamook County Creamery Association has had a history of passing down processes from artisan to artisan.  When a new CEO came on board about 18 months ago he realized that he needed to quickly get a handle on the company’s processes in order to move forward and compete in today’s market.

It was Steve Burge who was tapped to put together a Process Management Model to lead the collection and documentation of the company’s processes.

Take a listen to the podcast I did with Steve where he talks about his challenge and how he and a core team mapped all of Tillamook’s processes within six months.

I want to talk a little bit about what is, in my mind, the most interesting part of having exposure to BPM initiatives across a wide range of industries.

This is in fact one of the great advantages that we at Lombardi have as a pure-play solution provider, and it’s something we’re going to continue to capitalize on, especially from a services perspective.  It’s also one of the things that I love most about my job - the opportunity to solve process problems in an array of different verticals, taking and sharing best practices and key learnings among them.

BPM folk love to talk about agility. And it is less and less a secret that BPM is one very important way that organizations can future-proof themselves against the inevitable. In today’s case, for example, it’s rising fuel prices, the mortgage meltdown, and unstable capital markets, each of which is having a unique effect on our customers.

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The other day SearchCIO published a feature on BPM that included two Lombardi customers, Wells Fargo and NACCO Materials Handling.

The piece is notable as a case study because of the quantifiable successes it reports - for example, the $250,000 savings realized on a project with the centralized loan disposition group at Wells Fargo, and the cost authorization system that Bob Shallow and his team over at NACCO implemented in an unprecedented 15 days.

The author, Sarah Varney, is right in pointing out the many challenges companies face along the way - everything from internal politics, to an inherent distrust of IT tools on the part of the business, to issues of bandwidth and a lack of resources.  But as Wells Fargo and NACCO have shown, anything is possible with the right team and the right solution.

In part one of this two-part Process People interview, we welcomed Raju Oak, head of process services at Kleinwort Benson in London. Raju is part of the transformation and systems services group within the company. Kleinwort Benson is a provider of banking and financial services to corporate and private clients in the UK and Channel Islands. In Part 2 we hear more about Raju’s key learnings from his BPM implementation.

Process People: How did Kleinwort Benson determine the metrics by which the company deems the project to be a success, both initially and on an on-going basi?

Raju Oak: It is important to note that our initial project was a pilot designed to first prove out the potential of the BPM approach. We faced several challenges during the pilot project that we had to negotiate along the way. Perhaps the biggest issue was that the pilot was being introduced through IT, and at that time IT did not have strong credibility with the business. At the same time the business did not recognize the connection between the challenges that it faced and the absence of a managed process infrastructure. We also had a strong skepticism about BPM within some parts of IT as well, based upon an earlier failed attempt to implement a workflow tool from another vendor as a point solution. There really was no experience of process engineering within the business. These challenges made it a complex and vulnerable project, with a long gestation, and its success depended upon strong leadership from the CTO.

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In this two-part Process People interview, we welcome Raju Oak, head of process services at Kleinwort Benson in London. Raju is part of the transformation and systems services group within the company. Kleinwort Benson is a provider of banking and financial services to corporate and private clients in the UK and Channel Islands.

Process People: Describe in as much detail as possible the problem or need on a project level that first made you consider BPM and/or Lombardi as a viable solution.

Raju Oak: At Kleinwort Benson, our organisation faced four challenges that we needed to address quickly:

• First, our reliance on ‘point applications’ to satisfy functional requirements for the business resulted in us having a large, expensive and fragmented IT landscape. It was soaking up a large percentage of our budget and it constrained our responsiveness;
• Second, the ever increasing regulation in financial services required us to have tremendous visibility across our business processes, coupled with integrated reporting on the outcomes. That in turn, required us to address the whitespaces between our various point solutions;
• Third, we needed a uniform way to integrate and manage several parts of the business that each had dissimilar infrastructures and processes (a strategy we call ‘regionalisation’).
• Finally, changing market conditions required the organisation to step up the scale and complexity of its offerings while reducing the time to market, which was difficult in the absence of a process governance framework.

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This post is all about the cultural changes that BPM can (and needs to) drive within an organization. But it’s also about some of the ways in which processes don’t live in the clouds — they live on the ground, in real situations, with real people. I think it’s really important to remember this fact in our day-to-day work. I like telling this story because it’s from a long time ago when technology was quite different — and yet there are stark similarities to the challenges that we face today.

When I started at Sprint (my former employer), I was among the people who just assumed that when you picked up the phone, there would always be a dial tone — to me this was no big deal. I didn’t really understand all the technology, all the incredible things in the background that happen to actually put phone service in your home. This was of course ten years ago, so cell phones were popular, but everybody still had a landline, and the company overall was still focused on the latter market.

One of the first things the company did was send me out to a call center. This was part of my “process discovery” phase in my new role (though we didn’t call it that) — my goal was to see and document how things actually worked, and then find ways for us to improve.

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Recently we sat down with Rachel Aukes, a member of the Wells Fargo Financial Information Systems Continuous Improvement Team. Rachel, who plays an active role in the use of BPM at Wells Fargo, shared how Wells Fargo got started with BPM. In February, Wells Fargo received the Global Award for Excellence in BPM and workflow.

Process People: Describe in as much detail as possible the problem or need on a project level that first made you consider BPM and/or Lombardi as a viable solution.

Rachel Aukes: Our BPM program came about as a solution to organizational level needs - in fact we selected our BPM solution (Teamworks) and began to implement it before deciding on a specific project. We were challenged with increasingly complex, paper-intensive processes that had a large number of manual steps and handoffs. That was obviously inefficient and meant there was room for errors (such as bad typing, misplaced files, etc.). The idea of what BPM offers became prevalent in 2006 when most of our development staff was focused on maintaining our legacy systems while building our future systems of record. This effort was strategically important to our company; however, the business had immediate tactical needs that must continue to be met. We asked ourselves what we should do to best support our business partners, and we determined that BPM was a good solution for this. We haven’t looked back.

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