• First, Paul Swinson, CREWS Programme Manager, Homeloan Management Ltd. (HML) will present a solution provider session detailing how the Company used BPM to improve the control and efficiency across its customer’s Credit Management Processes.  Attendees will discover how organisations can get the most BPM value from the 2009 ‘Global Excellence in BPM & Workflow’ award winner.

 Time: Monday, March 1, 14:30 – 15:00 in Westbourne 3

•  Next, Tukka Heinonen, Head of Business Process Management, Business Services Finland(part of TeliaSonera) will share his BPM experiences in an end-user case study – “Implementing BPM to Streamline Sales Process in TeliaSonera Finland.”

 Time: Monday, March 1, 15:25 – 16:05 in Westbourne 1

• Also,  Neil Francis, Head of Business Operations Support Services, Euler Hermes UK, will present an end-user case study entitled: “Beware – BPM Tools Are Very Seductive!” 

Time: Tuesday, March 2, 11:50 – 12:30 in Westbourne 1

Additionally, Jim Rudden, our global VP of marketing, will be participating in a Premier Sponsor panel discussion on the main stage. That panel, entitled “Speed Predicting,” is being moderated by Daryl Plummer, Managing VP and Gartner Fellow & Jim Sinur, Research VP, Gartner. The panel format is guaranteed to be unlike any you’ve seen in the past, so you won’t want to miss it.

Time: Monday March 1, 11:30 – 12:00 in Wesbourne 3. 

While you are at the conference, come by to meet the Lombardi team as well as our new IBM brethren in the Solution Showcase located in the Nine Kings Suite on the ground floor of the hotel.  As an added treat, we will be serving a sampling of Champagne, Chocolate and Strawberries on Monday night.

We hope to see you there!

• NACCO Materials Handling Group – 2009 CIO 100 Award for automating several processes and introducing the capability to track core processes in real time, eliminating the risk of defective designs entering production.
• WE Energies – Honorable Mention – Gartner “Out of the Box BPM Delivery” Award for improving efficiencies and customer service of their Low Income Pilot Project which helps low income customers change their long term approach to managing their energy consumption and their energy bill.
• Homeloan Management Ltd. UK – 2009 Silver BPM Excellence Award for Europe for their Credit Management Project which has significantly improved the efficiency of the process and also added a much greater level of control.
• Lincoln Trust Company – 2009 Gold BPM Excellence Award for N. America for delivering the most tangible results and benefits to its users which have generated firm metrics including reduced staffing costs, reduction in cycle-times for internal and external stakeholders, and substantial increase in employee productivity.

Congratulations to these and all of our customers for their continued success with BPM – As Lombardi joins the IBM family, we certainly look forward to another remarkable year of customer successes in 2010!

Rachel recently sat down with Jim Rudden, VP of Marketing with Lombardi to record a webinar on how Blueprint has helped her company restructure, document and standardize their processes. To listen to the full webinar, click here.

In the webinar, Rachel explains that one of the biggest challenges they faced was that everyone had their own way of doing things. Documents were in piles all over people’s desks and everyone was doing their processes differently. There was no standardization within their processes, which was costing them time and money. PRC needed to be able to take a narrative of their situation and see it in a visual manner.

Blueprint, Lombardi’s business process mapping tool, was able to help PRC turn text based documentation into graphical diagrams to identify process opportunities. Once PRC was able to visualize their processes and see the loopholes, the light bulbs went on!

The results of mapping out their processes in Blueprint was the ability to clearly centralize and standardize business processes across separate groups, saving them both time and money.

If you don’t have an account yet, just sign up for a free 30 day trial now. And if you want to hear the latest inside info on what’s coming next, make sure you follow us on Twitter.

Aviva currently has 23 live BPM projects. One, the “Joiners, movers and leavers” system, tracks staff across their time with Aviva, from both an HR, and an information and systems access point of view. It was built in less than 12 weeks using Lombardi’s BPM tools.

In the podcast, Mr. Redshaw claimed that BPM is the single-most important technology he has seen for helping to improve the business in his 28+ years. We couldn’t agree more!

To listen to the entire interview (7:05), go here

The first customer is Homeloan Management Limited (HML), a UK-based mortgage lender. They were selected for the strong case study results achieved while using BPM to streamline their Credit Management Processes. The second customer, Lincoln Trust Company (LTI), is based in Denver, CO. They achieved finalist status for implementing an enterprise wide BPM program that manages all strategic processes within the organization. LTI is especially proud of the measurable results of their program in the areas of driving processes to the web, reducing costs and risks, improving customer satisfaction, and completely turning around a damaged relationship between their IT and business organizations.

The prestigious Global Awards for Excellence in BPM, sponsored by WfMC, BPMFocus and BPM.com, are now in their 16^th year and recognize user organizations that have demonstrably excelled in implementing innovative business process solutions to meet strategic business objectives.

We are proud to congratulate both HML and LTI for their achievements and for being named 2009 BPM Excellence Award finalists!

In February of 2009 SEARHC launched the ALERT Emergency Department Information System, becoming one of the first and largest tribal health organizations in the country to begin implementing this comprehensive electronic medical record (EMR) system.  The ALERT EMR is interconnected to ancillary systems (Novarad for diagnostic imaging, Mediware for pharmacy, Orchard for laboratory, etc) using the Health Level  Seven (HL7) messaging protocol.  HL7 facilitates a standard language between systems, but SEARHC recognized the need for process mapping and documentation in the messaging methodology since every vendor accepted and passed along data such as x-ray orders, lab reports and billing information in slightly different ways.

SEARHC’s use of Blueprint wasn’t just about process mapping and documentation, but really about communicating and collaborating with their external vendors.  SEARHC subscribes to Blueprint as Authors, where they can define and document processes. They then supply their vendors with Participant seats for viewing and providing feedback.  In this way, processes mapped out by SEARHC can be easily viewed and commented on by vendors.  Blueprint process diagrams are treated as working documents, providing SEARHC the ability to discuss HL7 workflow proposals and to negotiate changes on the fly.  Blueprint serves as a great collaborative tool as it allows for effective communication between SEARHC and its vendors.

SEARHC’s internal processes have also become more efficient after the concept of swimlanes was so easily demonstrated with Blueprint – now the right task is done by the right person at the right time!  According to Peter,  SEARHC staff have found the product to be very useful and are impressed with the updates – I’m sure they are excited about the latest Blueprint release!

At Lombardi, we say this all the time. Obtaining useful data about the quality of decisions being made – as well as the patterns that drive those decisions – is the first step in realizing the promise of BPM.

However, in order for data to be turned into “wisdom,” I think it is important for companies to realize that it has to be viewed through three primary filtering principles. They are:

1. Visibility – Show me information in a human-consumable format. It needs to provide details that can be understood by mere mortals.
2. Analysis – Allow me to ‘twist and turn’ and ‘slice and dice’ the information views so that I can extrapolate information from the data and deduce higher-level knowledge as necessary. 
3. Control – Once I’ve seen, analyzed, and judged what the data is telling me, allow me to take some immediate action on the source of data (the process) in a way that lets me materially affect the outcome. 

In my mind, the three points made above are the key stepping stones that separate workflow automation from BPM. In fact, I think of automation as merely the “step zero” that must to occur in the sequence above before I can get any real insight into my processes.

Now, in contrast to my insurance customer example, there are also other many other business processes where the primary purpose of automation is to drive repeatability, and to deal with exceptions in such a way that it ultimately turns those exceptions back to repeatability. In essence, I’m talking about the industrialization of human decision making.
 
These processes do exist (for example, customers doing processes such as vehicle registration renewal, product returns, shipment re-routing, and even HR on-boarding) and in isolation, the biggest benefit that our customers derive from a BPM tool in this instance is the automation of their workflows. But in this case, the process reports that they receive either measure efficiency of the industrialization (rework, time spent, etc.) or only hold business value when taken in context with a higher-level parent process.

Perhaps the distinction between what could be referred to as “BPM-ripe” processes and “BPM-ambivalent-but-automation-ripe” processes is an important factor in determining an organization’s BPM Maturity Level.  

One of the mantras of the BPMC team here at Lombardi is to help customers understand that the difference between these two distinctions. This is really important, because it can mean the difference between companies doing the right thing for their unique BPM project starting on “day one” versus having them realize what the right thing is – much, much later in the project (such as during the third playback).

It’s obvious BPM has come of age when mainstream media programs are starting to weigh-in on the topic.

The hour-long show featured ‘HIM: Handling the Human Side of BPM,’ and focused on whether the new Human Interaction Management (HIM) framework  is necessary given that BPM already addresses most of the same issues and is a mature discipline. 

In addtion to Phil, the other invited guests were Clay Richardson (senior analyst at Forrester) and Howard Smith (BPM author and CTO of CSC’s European Group).

If you are interested in hearing how BPM can help your organization,  or if you need a better way to explain its benefits to your executives, you should listen to the replay. You can access the replay here (not required to register).

FCE, which is a subsidiary of the Bank of Ireland Group, provides a broad range of currency conversion products and services to wide range of industries and uses both Blueprint and Teamworks as an alternative to traditional application development. Using BPM lets them deliver projects an eye-popping 50% faster than traditional  approaches.

Some important take-aways discussed in the webinar include:

• How they became self sufficient after their very first project
• How they gather business requirements in a much more collaborative way
• How they recevied valuable feedback during development, not waiting until after it’s 80% built
• How to engage the business to take ownership in their business applications

To listen to the FCE webinar, go here (you will need to register) or alternately you can listen to a podcast version of the interview here.

The article, “MUSC cuts error rates and improves efficiency with automation” discusses the financial grants management process that MUSC implemented in Lombardi Teamworks. It also points out the reasons why they elected NOT to go with an ERP system to accomplish this project, and and how they incorporated some legacy systems into the process.

Some nice ROI figures that MUSC achieved:

• [Teamworks] has reduced the per-grant error rate dramatically, from 85 – 90 percent down to just 20 - 25 percent initially, then finally 2 percent to 3 percent as users learned to use more efficient processes.
• “human touches” during the grants allocation process, traditionally a source of errors in any process, have dropped 65 percent.

You may read the whole story here

Details about their presentations are below. Also, stop by to see me and the rest of the Lombardi team in the Solution Showcase.

• Paul Tazbaz, Enterprise Architect at Wells Fargo, will present the best practices keynote session entitled “Architecting BPM through a Center of Excellence at Wells Fargo Bank”

Time: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 at 9:40 – 10:25 a.m. (all times are PT)

• Cheryl Mascaro, Enterprise Architect at Intel, will present a case study discussing “BPM vs. BPM – The Discipline and the Technology.”

Time: Tuesday, June 30, 11:20 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.

• Sean Perry, CIO, and Steve Nimmo, senior manager of business process and performance improvement, from Robert Half International (RHI), will share their BPM experiences in an end-user case study – “How Robert Half International is Delivering Results with BPM.”

Time: Tuesday, June 30, 2:10 – 2:55 p.m.

Also, Brandon Baxter, Lombardi’s senior product marketing manager, will present “Clear Directions for BPM Success.” Brandon will talk about how comapnies can ensure long-term BPM success by using proven project development and deployment capabilities. He will also be on the BPM vendor panel discussing “Tips for Starting and Maintaining a Successful BPM Initiative.” Those are always fun.

Time: Tuesday, June 30, 3:50 – 4:35 p.m., and the panel runs immediately afterward.

We hope to see you there!

The 2009 CIO 100 Awards honor 100 companies that are creating new business value by innovating with technology.

We are especially proud that Teamworks was the only BPM product specifically mentioned by CIO as delivering customer value in the awards, and that it has saved NACCO approximately $2 million, while improving their customer satisfaction and time to market.

Congratulations to the NACCO team!

The following is reported to us by Stewart Mixon, Chief Operations Officer at the Medical University of South Carolina.

MUSC is the oldest medical school in the Southeast, with 1,200 faculty members teaching more than 3,000 students and residents annually. MUSC depends upon financial grants as a primary means of funding its medical research. The university manages the post award grants allocation process where up to 3,000 requests for grant fund distribution changes are made every quarter.

Previously, this process was entirely manual; the same information was keyed into different front-end and back-end systems, resulting in significant backlogs and delays, as well as many errors and rework efforts.  Due to error rates and other contributing factors, there were more than twice as many forms submitted in the manual process than are processed using the Lombardi Teamworks product today.

This new process quickly delivered significant benefits for the university, enabling MUSC to proactively catch and eliminate errors at the point of entry, bringing the per-grant error rate from 85-90% down to 2-3%.

Through the use of Teamworks, MUSC also was able to reduce “human touches” in the grants allocation process by an impressive 65% — allowing the university to free up several staff full-time equivalents (FTEs) for other important tasks.

Moreover, through the use of Teamworks dashboards, MUSC management receives key performance indicators containing real-time status information of all of its financial grants distribution activities. This important metric was impossible to collect prior to implementation of the new process.

If you’d like to learn more, you can also watch this webinar with Stewart and Salvatore Salamone from Ziff Davis.

One of the efforts that helped in this restructuring and which continues today is an effort to document, standardize and communicate all of the company’s processes.

Rachel Pace-Maron, Director of Operations Support Service was asked to lead this effort with a shoe-string budget.  Last week I chatted with Rachel to learn more about her effort.

My conversation with Rachel (11:19)  Listen

Some of the topics Rachel tackles:

• The goal with mapping PRC’s processes was to find out how they could do things better and faster and why things take so long.  They weren’t able to answer why a process took so long because no one person knew every step.  This is what lead them to process mapping.
• One of the first processes they mapped was “agent time,” how much time do agents spend on break and what is the management process for keeping them on the phone efficiently and within break parameters.
• They found each call center had a different process and none were doing it efficiently.
• By standardizing on a process for all centers and bringing them into metric, they had a bottom line impact on revenue.
• Before adopting Lombardi Blueprint for process mapping, groups had been using, Visio, Exel and Power Point.
• PRC has a group of people who are visually oriented and a group who are narrative oriented. As Rachel explains, “Blueprint’s ability to marry picture to narrative has been fantastic and, I’m not going to say life altering, but certainly business altering.”
• Her excitement over the latest Blueprint release and how the addition of participants will help PRC break down silos and take their process initiative to the next level.

Finextra has more here.

Toby Redshaw, Aviva’s CIO presented at the Gartner BPM Summit this past February with a session titled: “Aviva End-User Case Study: Modern BPM – Doing More for Less“. In his talk, Toby shared real-world insight on how companies can get started with BPM, how they should grow fast for maximum impact, and lessons learned from four years in the trenches with modern BPM.

We’re also proud that Toby has gone on the record, saying that:

“I consider modern BPM to be one of a handful of breakthrough technologies that can have real short-term P&L impact. In an era when virtually all IT shops are being asked to do more with less…we believe partnering with Lombardi now will get us there faster and better than any other choice in the market.”

Toby hits the nail on the head — no issue is more relevant to companies large and small than process, and process excellence. BPM has been shown to reduce costs by 20% in the first year and is the #1 priority for CEO’s in 2009.

Stay tuned as Aviva progresses – we’ll loop back to provide metrics, best practices, and lessons learned as soon as they are available.

Here are a couple of interesting thoughts/takeaways that came up during the conference.

The BPM Talent Gap

As companies really try to ramp up their BPM initiatives, they often encounter a “BPM talent gap” in their own organizations as well as in the partners they typically use for solution delivery. Phil Gilbert, Lombardi’s President, talked about how this talent gap is found in multiple roles – from Business Analysis to Program Management to Business Leadership. The good news is that this gap can be readily addressed – often with the team you have at hand. Its just a matter of recognizing the gaps and developing a known set of skills. In fact, Toby Redshaw, CIO at Aviva, talked about the fact that anyone who wants to work in IT over the next few years must be focused on gaining the skills and capabilities required to succeed with BPM. This talent gap issue was also discussed at Gartner’s BPM Show in San Diego this Spring as well as in a great research article called “IT’s Unmet Potential” in the McKinsey Quarterly. Definitely recommended reading.

The Importance of Success Stories

The best way to launch a BPM Center of Excellence (COE) is with success stories. Sometimes the inclination is to focus only on defining standard templates, governance bodies, org structures and the like. In his session, Paul Tazbaz, Enterprise Architect from Wells Fargo talked about how they focused on documenting a set of BPM success stories at the beginning of their COE initiative. These success stories formed the basis of their early conversations with lines of business and corporate IT as they championed BPM across the company. Note that these success stories were about BPM – and many of the success stories predated the formation of the COE. No matter – Paul’s group is focused on getting business units to take advantage of BPM. No better way to do that than to tell them 10 stories about groups in Wells Fargo benefiting from BPM today. Sure makes for a more interesting first meeting with your lines of business than “This is BPMN and you WILL use it.”

Stay tuned for more tales from Lombardi Driven Online. Note that the conference is still available on-demand. If you are a customer or partner and missed the live event, you can still register for access here.

I caught up with Devin to learn about process improvement at Symantec and how his team was using Blueprint.

>>My talk with Devin (11:53): Take a Listen

Devin Rickard of Symantec's Business Process Improvement team

Some of the topics Devin tackles:

• Symantec has grown through rapid organic growth as well as acquisition.  This has led to processes being executed in islands. Devin’s group works with the islands to try and “pull them together into a single continent.”
• The team practices “stealth six sigma.”  They have adapted the processes and tools from Six Sigma so that they fit the Symantec corporate culture.
• What started as a nice tool for the practitioners has ended up becoming the core catalyst that brings together individuals and helps them to visualize what they are trying to improve upon for Symantec customers and partners.
• As business owners or process managers become engaged they are becoming aggressive adopters of Blueprint.  They find it gets them a picture of their business that they’ve never had before and they want to find the areas within their own processes that they can make improvements to.
• The interest/involvement of the business has noticeably shortened the time to improvements.
• Some of the projects Devin and team have used Blueprint for: transforming the quote to cash process and the procure to pay process (Blueprint helped to cut the time to pay employee expense reports from 3-5 weeks to 2-3 days) as well as working on ways to make the process of integrating acquisitions smoother.

Using their existing processes, complying with the new rules would have required hiring over 12,000 new employees.

Recently SearchCIO reporter Kristen Caretta wrote an excellent piece on how UCLH met this challenge using BPM.

The piece is especially helpful as a case study in how to evangelize BPM internally, and getting buy-in from senior management on the business side.

To read more about executive-level buy-in, you can check out this post too, by VP of Services Toby Cappello.

• Farrukh Humayun, vice president of information services, PNC Bank, will present a case study session entitled “How National City Bank is Delivering Clear Results with BPM.”

Time: Monday, March 23, 12:05 – 12:30 p.m. PT.
Location:  Grande Ballroom “B”

• Erik Keller, CIO at SIRVA will present a case study entitled “Leveraging BPM to Deliver Mission Critical Applications – One CIO’s Perspective.”

Time: Monday, March 23, 2:30 – 3:30 p.m. PT
Location: Grande Ballroom “B”

• Paul Tazbaz, enterprise architect, EA Solutions at Wells Fargo Bank will present a case study entitled, “Building a Process COE at Wells Fargo Bank.”

Time: Tuesday, March 24, 09:30 -10:30 a.m. PT
Location: Grande Ballroom “A”

• Dan Wang, manager of business process architecture at StubHub!, will participate on a BPM case study panel session entitled “Change Management in Action – Are You Ready for BPM?”

Time: Wednesday, March 25, 10:00 – 11:00 a.m. PT
Location: Grande Ballroom “B”

Stacie and I discussed how she worked over the last year to help create a small commercial offering which, before BPM and process mapping, had not been practical to offer.

We also discussed the role that process mapping played in the recent IT department re-org, helping to streamline processes and breakdown silos.

My talk with Stacie (7:17)

West Bend BA, Stacie Kenney

Some of the Topics we tackle:

• West Bend’s “Smart Business” offering and how it leverages new technologies like services, content generation tool and Teamworks.
• Given that the “Smart Business” premiums were small, the goal was to de-complicate the process so that the agencies could set up the policy with very little time up front.
• Before Blueprint, the BA’s leveraged Visio for flows along with a “mammoth” spec doc in Word.  The biggest issue with this approach was keeping the content in sync.
• West Bend was drawn to Blueprint by its collaboration and document generation capabilities.
• The “Road To Excellence” and the IT re-org, breaking down silos and centralizing the BA’s.
• Using process mapping to document the flow of work coming into the BA group from the business, categorize it and then deliver it back on a monthly basis.

Hasbro recently won the Service and Technology Innovation Award for their e-Connect application, which is built on Teamworks. The award was presented by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) as part of the Hong Kong Logistics Awards.

We wanted to take the time to congratulate the Hasbro team, and particularly the Far East division, on this important recognition of their work. The Logistics Awards are a major accolade for manufacturers doing business in Hong Kong and China.

This also represents the latest in a long line of awards for Hasbro, going all the way back to 2006, when they were named to their InfoWorld 100 for their first implementation, which also marked the very beginning of the e-Connect project.

But more importantly, here’s what won Hasbro the attention of their peers.

Hasbro Far East Limited has 800 employees and an incredibly diverse and complex supply chain. Every year, they manage upwards of 8,000 SKU’s, which are in turn manufactured by over 100 suppliers with factories in South China. They produce 45,000 containers of product, which are shipped to 24 affiliates and 600 direct importers in 46 different countries.

The e-Connect system is what holds it all together; it delivers a platform that connects manufacturers, suppliers, and logistics providers by enabling self-service transactions and seamlessly integrating them into Hasbro’s ERP system.  The end-to-end process is impressively streamlined and has resulted in a significant reduction in cycle times. It also allows all of the company’s business partners to be integrated intro the logistics and supply chain from the very core of operations.

Congrats again to the Hasbro team.

To learn more about their BPM strategy and implementation, click here for access to a case study, an analyst report by Forrester, and several news articles detailing their ongoing accomplishments.

Since the story was a great example of tackling a process documentation effort that involved the whole org, rather than just IT, we decided to turn it into a webinar.  We worked with ModernAnalyst.com and created a 35 minute webinar which you can check out here (note that it takes a few seconds to load).

Enjoy!

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.

Process People: How are costs and funding shared across different organizations and different projects, what is your recommendation for how to handle that?

Farrukh Humayun: Today our funding is still done at the project level. What we are trying to do is establish funding for a BPM program, where the program will be given X-million dollars to go spend and deliver Y-million dollars in benefits. Hopefully Y is greater than X.

My recommendation is that, if you go that way, you will be able to create a culture where somebody is accountable to go find process opportunities that deliver benefits and you are not an organization that is waiting for projects to come to you.

Process People: You talked about the challenges of getting the business engaged – how did you actually accomplish it?

Farrukh Humayun: Our “road shows” were actually quite effective. What was interesting about them was that people got the idea of process automation, but what’s harder for them to grasp is the next step of process management which is continuous management and improvement. So when we showed them some of the sample applications we built, and some of the benefits, about 20 minutes into the presentation I could have just disappeared because the business was already buzzing about the potential saying “you know what we could do with this!” It’s the “show me” part of this that works really well, where they can touch and feel and see some things in action and they can recognize the value very quickly.

The harder part is when you actually get the business engaged into the project and then you try to talk about what the process is versus what it should to be. For instance, it can get difficult when you ask: “If you think this is what it should to be, then how does it tie back to the benefits that you were trying to achieve?”

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.

Last week I chatted with Gary Faulkner of Morphis about how they found themselves unexpectedly leading process mapping sessions for customers or, as Gary likes to describe the turn of events, “A funny thing happened on the way to the software business.”

Take a listen:

My talk with Gary (6:59):

Blueprint enabled a pair-o-dime shift for this currency manager.

Some of the Topics we tackle:

• Conundrum: Morphis is meant to be customized to fit a customer’s process but if a customer can’t describe their process how can Morphis be customized?
• Being new to process mapping they were looking for something that was intuitive and easy to use.
• The power of seeing the process laid out visually and the importance of working on the exercise collaboratively.
• How Morphis’s implementations are all done virtually over Webex around the globe

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.

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.  I gave Steve a call and we talked about his challenge and how he and a core team mapped all of Tillamook’s processes within six months.

Take a Listen:

My talk with Steve (7:06)

More Info

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.

In fact, one of the things that my team and I are spending a lot of time on these days is going out and looking at new and/or developing industry requirements, things from a compliance perspective, for example, that are coming up in legislative decisions and that may very well impact different organizations and different industries profoundly. By getting in front of these changes and helping customers to understand how they can use BPM to solve related/resulting issues, we help them not only comply, but also acheive visibility into things that they are mandated or regulated to do – proactively, instead of reactively.

Slowly, more and more enterprises are coming to understand the difference between proactively dealing with changes in the market, and again, doing so only reactively. The former group is taking advantage of a major opportunity to get a leg up on competitors.  BPM has the power to expose, and subsequently capitalize on, these opportunities.

But to get in on the front end of these opportunities  requires expertise and research that isn’t always readily available if you work in-house. Like I said above, I love my job because I get a chance to work in every industry/vertical imaginable and use my skills in each. Being proactive also involves being innovative, and often it means being the first in your industry to tackle a new problem.

When you have the kind of exposure that we have — exposure across industries and verticals — something reveals itself to you that might at first seem completely counterintuitive, and that’s what I’m driving at and what I want to share as the big takeaway of this post.

When you’re exposed to a diversity of BPM challenges, what you very quickly figure out is that whether you are dealing with, say, a huge manufacturer of X and Y parts, or a big box retailer, or a big entertainment conglomerate, all of the processes involved pretty much look the same.

Order to cash looks pretty much the same, the HR on-boarding process looks pretty much the same, inventory management looks pretty much the same. . .a process is a process is a process.

Now don’t get me wrong, the devil certainly is in the details, and there is a great deal of nuance involved. But after you’ve done it enough times, the similarities outweigh the differences by far.

Nonetheless, enterprises can get really hung up on how insurmountably complex and confusing their individual challenges are. Sometimes when you’re looking around in your own industry and seeing your competitors and colleagues having the same problems and also having the same difficulties solving those problems, it’s only natural to question whether there really is, in fact, a viable solution at all. But this is precisely the kind of mentality that eventually leads an organization to take a reactive approach to process, rather than a proactive one, which as I suggested above is a far superior way of going about improving the way you do business.

Everyone has “the most complex process in the world”. Sometimes it’s even a badge of honor, a sign that you’ve been to hell and back. . .and survived.  It’s not fun to be in this situation, and I’m not suggesting that anyone is exaggerating – there is nothing more legitimately mind-numbing and stress-inducing than a process that refuses to cooperate.

But once you’ve had experience in a variety of verticals and industries, you’re able to abstract these localized, industry-specific problems.  You can bring it up a level and you actually can learn from other industries. Like I said, a process is a process is a process. The traditional assumption is that what worked for a financial services firm couldn’t possibly work in the food services industry, for example. But is can, and it does.

Ironically we can often take learnings in one industry that has literally nothing to do with another (at face value anyway), and apply some of our successes and some of those learnings and really get companies to start thinking about things in a way that they maybe hadn’t thought about before. It can be a truly liberating experience.  The puzzle might be completely different, but the pieces are almost always the same. When an organization starts to realize this, it opens eyes and allows the team to be much more proactive. You start to look around and think ahead of the curve. You get hungry again, instead of just trying to make it out alive.

I try to help customers understand that the process is only as big and as bad as you make it, and that’s the truth.

We are working with several companies right now that will tell you that their process problems are the most complex of any organization that we will ever work with. Specifically we have one customer who is in a retail environment and they are working on inventory management and it is the most complex inventory management process ever, according to them. But we have another customer who is oversees and they are an entertainment company, and they are looking at inventory and order management and of course they think that they have the most complex process as well.  And yet another customer (that I can’t say much about, unfortunately) currently finds itself in the very same boat too.

If I were to describe all three inventory management processes, or even map them and use generic terms to document them, all three of those customers would think that the diagram I had put up on the wall was their own.

I want to encourage companies in any and every industry to think about what they can learn from other industries and verticals, even if it does seem counterintuitive at first. The help of a vendor or a consulting or services firm may help, but the fundamental insight that I want to convey still stands – a process is a process is a process – and the solution is out there. In recognizing this, you can pull yourself up out of a traditional, reactive approach and start thinking about competitive advantage again, about innovating ahead of the curve, and about taking on new challenges before they become a threat to your business.

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.

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.

Because of this, we ran the BPM pilot as a “skunk works” project so that we could bring business “a success”. The metrics for the pilot were defined and agreed upon with the CTO and focused on the ability of the solution to address many of our challenges. The success of the pilot resulted in us taking the process live to the business with considerable success. While we don’t like to share specific numbers, I can tell you that our metrics for the live production process were focused around the areas of visibility, manageability, through-put, level of process integration, transaction times and overall effort.

Process People: What are some key learnings that you would offer to IT people just getting started with BPM at their companies?

Raju Oak: Senior business management must be convinced of the approach, the methodology, the technology, the solution and you have to have the ability to generate support for the approach from within IT.

You need to introduce business modeling skills and methods to IT (in addition to application development-oriented methods they already use) and make staff aware of the distinction between each.

It is a good idea to construct a process model that solves a ‘real’ business problem using business vocabulary, and demonstrate what a ‘managed’ process infrastructure means in your environment. This includes building a method for process analysis and deployment appropriate to the level of maturity within your organization.

Companies need to create a BPM champion from within their IT staff who is capable of communicating the distinction between workflow and business process management to the rest of IT.

And last, but certainly not least you need to be able to get the IT staff and business users to jointly show to senior management that BPM is a viable approach. This includes explaining the solution, methodology and of course having an implementation and change management plan to take the solution live

Process People: Where do you think that BPM is moving over the next 5-10 years? What changes are going to really push the technology forward?

Raju Oak: BPM is currently crossing the chasm between being a specialist toolkit adopted by visionaries as a means of differentiation and competitive advantage, and that of being a mainstream management approach within an industry ecosystem that assures those who apply it a degree of success. As more examples of comprehensive BPM implementations by successful role models [e.g., companies] emerge, the take-up will increase even faster. I think as the market matures, the focus will change away from implementing and managing portfolios of processes, to one of managing an integrated enterprise process governance framework. This will require a step change in the scale and sophistication of technology, not unlike the step up from point applications to ERP systems.

]]> http://blog.lombardi.com/process-people-qa-with-raju-oak-kleinwort-benson-private-bank-part-2/feed/ 1 http://blog.lombardi.com/process-people-qa-with-raju-oak-kleinwort-benson-private-bank-part-1/ http://blog.lombardi.com/process-people-qa-with-raju-oak-kleinwort-benson-private-bank-part-1/#comments Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:17:01 +0000 Wayne Snell http://blog.lombardi.com/?p=134 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.

Implementing BPM using Lombardi as a tool was proposed as an approach that had the ability to simultaneously help us address all four of these challenges.

Process People: How did you initially present the idea of BPM as a solution and to whom?

Raju Oak: At our company the idea to use BPM technology was originally presented to our Chief Technology Officer. As a visionary, our CTO recognised the benefits of the BPM approach to resolving the four challenges that I mentioned before, and that the technology offered us a way for IT be repositioned as a key enabler to the business. The CTO needed permission from our Chief Operations Officer to proceed with the project. It is really interesting to note that the success of our BPM initiative helped to contribute to the CTO being given a wider mandate, with responsibility for all transformation and process services in addition to systems and technology, as well as promotion to the title of ‘Chief Transformation Officer’.

Process People: Where did the BPM program originate – IT or the business? Who leads it today?

Raju Oak: The BPM program originated within our IT organisation. Once it had established some credibility and success, it was spun off to a newly formed process services group with an identity separate from IT. It now forms a large part of the Chief Transformation Officer’s mandate.

We’ll continue this interview with Part 2 next week. Questions or comments, chime in below!

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. First I got to key orders from customers for about a week, where we had to get all of their information over the phone. I was very precise with my orders, and I was well-trained by the people I was sitting with to make sure that, in this example, I provided instructions and physical directions for the technicians who would later make the site visits. Again, remember that we didn’t have iPhones and Google Maps! I included every last detail in the order, because when I sent that technician out I wanted to know that they were going to be able to do what we had committed to the customer, in the allotted period of time.

Then I flew down to Henderson, which is outside of Las Vegas and I rode with the technician that serviced the orders that I had keyed, so I would actually get to see the implementation of my work in the call center, on the delivery end of things. As I rode around with the technician, I listened to him grumble all morning about “Those service center people . . .why can’t they give us enough information! Most of this area isn’t developed, we don’t have good maps, all I need them to do is provide me with driving instructions and they just won’t do it.” And I was so puzzled because I had printed copies of all of my orders with me and on line 76 of every one of my orders there was a big remark that had all of the information as far as driving instructions went.

Now, the technician worked from a handheld unit — a small laptop-ish piece of equipment. It was supposed to give him a full download of my order. So I said, “What do you mean you don’t have driving directions? I keyed them in right here.” He looked at the paper order I was holding and he replied, “Well, no I don’t, I have the address, I don’t have this either, or this and this.” And I said “But you need to know that it is the third street down here past the light, on a street called Sun Circle, and after you turn left it’s the second house on the right with the brown siding. . .” And he looked at me like I was an alien. As you know, I was the one that keyed these orders, and once I told him that, the technician felt awful, thinking that he had offended me. I said to him that of course I wasn’t angry in the least, but that I needed to understand why he didn’t have what I keyed in.

Well, we kind of went off into our own little analysis and what we found out in the end was that their handheld units only allowed them to see the first sixty lines of information on the order — the 76^th line just didn’t show up at all. So as a service center rep, I was doing my best and every other service center rep up there was doing their best to provide every bit of detail that the customer was providing and yet the process was fundamentally broken and the technicians weren’t getting the information that they so desperately needed. As a result, the service center people thought the technicians were idiots that didn’t read what was in front of them. The technicians thought the service center people were idiots because they didn’t provide the proper information. Further, these two groups didn’t talk to each other, and they each were pointing fingers at each other, and so here I was as the neutral party, trying to patch things up! About four stops into our day’s work, we had found the real root cause of the problem. It was a technology issue. It wasn’t a people issue, and it wasn’t even a process issue.

I made a very simple call to the service center and I explained to the trainer and the manager up there what had happened. I said, “You know, you have an unused remarks field on line 16, so can you send out a broadcast and have all of your reps start putting their comments there instead of on line 76, so that our technicians can see that?” It was fixed immediately.

And so the technician was hearing all of this as I’m on the phone and we are going into lunch that day and all of the technicians typically gather at the same place. There were about twenty of them that had all congregated, and we sat down and my technician friend walks in like he was dragging the queen of Egypt with him, saying, “You will not believe what we just did!” All of technicians were suddenly empowered because they felt like they were part of solving a problem. And then everybody got so excited that they felt like they could tell me anything and right then and there we were going to solve world hunger.

Sound familiar?

Ultimately that day was all about the people behind the process, and opening the lines of communication between groups and thus being able to facilitate a simple discussion that could change everything. I really love that about process — I like knowing enough about the big picture, to ask stupid questions, and the discoveries that come as a result. I like empowering people to help make changes that profoundly affect their ability to do their job, and in doing so, affecting an overall cultural change where communication and collaboration carry the day. Frankly, it’s why I love my job, and it’s what gets me up in the morning.

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.

Process People: Where did the BPM program originate – IT or the business? Who leads it today?

Rachel Aukes: Our BPM program originated within IT and has over time evolved towards the business. Through the experience we’ve gained through delivering process solutions using BPM, we determined that the business people are excellent at determining where the BPM program should focus – that is what helps us to get the best value. When we started, IT “cherry-picked” projects that looked like a good fit for BPM, because they offered us sizeable savings in terms of money, effort, etc. After several projects, we realized that even though we were achieving good results, cherry picking is not always the best approach to remain aligned with the long-term business vision. We are now putting the Business behind the steering wheel for the directional planning, project prioritization, and solution review efforts related to our BPM program.

Process People: What were some of the surprises along the way? What was the most unexpected thing that happened during your first project?

Rachel Aukes: We have learned a lot as we went through our BPM projects, and the first one was full of surprises! The most unexpected event was midway through the project. We had told our business partners we’d be back in one week ready for them to begin testing – this was about three weeks into the project. When we showed up, they were stunned to see us back so soon, saying they thought we were joking. From that we learned we must set (and continuously reset) expectations throughout the project. A second lesson that we learned from our first project came from a predictable event. Using Teamworks gave us an iterative approach towards our projects, which drastically cuts development and testing time, but we quickly learned that iterative development also leads to infinite scope. Because changes can be made so easily in the BPMS, we found that our business partners continuously wanted to add “just one more thing.” From that point on, we began to plan for interventions in each of our projects – a break in the project for IT and business management to reset expectations and scope.

Process People: Describe the reactions during the first process playback.

Rachel Aukes: Simply stated, there was love in the air. When we conducted our first playback it began with skepticism – how could we have something to show them already without having all the requirements? As the playback progressed, our business partners began to understand how they really do get to have a hand in designing their solution; no, they get to drive the design. By the end of the playback, they couldn’t wait for the next one so they could watch their process evolve seemingly before their eyes. Needless to say, playbacks have become the special niche for our BPM team.

In this Process People interview, we welcome Jeremy Kraybill, CIO for Boundless Network.

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.

Jeremy Kraybill: At Boundless Network, we were undergoing a business process re-engineering project at our business. We initially set out to document and analyze manual process changes that would reduce our company’s cash cycle and help us scale our back office. After the first couple weeks of the project, we realized that there were a whole set of business processes held in individuals’ heads that we could benefit from automating. Nobody at the company had previous BPM experience, but after looking at the first BPM vendor’s demo we knew that a BPM solution had great potential for our business pains. After a 3-month evaluation process we selected a BPM solution and have been very happy with the decision and how the implementations went.

Process People: How did you initially present the idea and to whom? Who did you need permission from to proceed?

Jeremy Kraybill: The initial idea was presented to our COO and co-founder. The decision to move ahead was approved by our company’s executive team. It was a fairly easy sell based on what we had uncovered in the manual process re-engineering efforts.

Process People: What were some of the surprises along the way? What was the most unexpected thing that happened during your first project?

Jeremy Kraybill: We were most pleased with how quickly we were able to get self-sufficient on the Teamworks modeling environment. The first phase of our implementation was achieved with 1 full-time person focused on modeling, 50% of my time on modeling and integration, and 25% of one of our Java developers on integration and web services work. We completed phase 1 of our project in under 6 weeks with 12 hours total of services help from our vendor and their product training up-front. Since then we have completed 5 additional project phases and have used about 4-8 hours of services work per phase.

Process People: How closely did the IT and business sides work together initially, and how closely do they work together today? Any recommendations for effectively facilitating this interaction?

Jeremy Kraybill: I think the most important role on a BPM project is selecting the right person to be the person who interprets business requirements into the design of the business process implementations in the BPM package. If it’s a small project or team, and one person does both the requirements gathering and the implementation (as was the case on our project), that person’s skill set is even more critical. The person requires good analytical abilities, as well as the process/technical background to be able to match the capabilities of the BPM package with the needs of the business.

Process People: What would you do over if given the chance?

Jeremy Kraybill: Our first phase went extremely smoothly, much more smoothly than expected. So for our second phase, we got more ambitious than originally planned, and rolled out a number of processes that were pretty radical changes to the way in which our sales support team did business. Because our first phase had been so smooth, we actually scaled back the amount of training and education we provided the users as compared to the first phase. We ended up with a number of our most experienced sales support staff, who were not receiving many BPM tasks from the first project phase, having some significant growing/adoption pains in the second phase. They just were not ready for how much of a daily change to their way of doing business it was. We addressed this through providing them with more education and training, and also with some business process changes in the third phase. It took a good 3-4 weeks of education and calls with the staff to get the second phase fully accepted.

Jeremy manages the Boundless Network technology group in Austin, TX. He has spent eleven years managing web application and enterprise IT projects. Prior to Boundless Network, Jeremy managed an eBay subsidiary, worked for two enterprise software startup companies, and had an independent web consulting practice in Australia. Jeremy’s professional interests include open source, intelligent web applications, usability, and the application design process.