Next week at the BPMInstitute.org BPM Conference in San Francisco, three Lombardi customers will be on hand to share their BPM success stories. The conference is being held downtown at the Parc 55 Hotel.

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!

I’m proud to announce that CIO Magazine has named NACCO Materials Handling Group as one of this year’s CIO 100 winners in recognition of its success with BPM. This is the second year in a row that one of Lombardi’s customers has won an award for their BPM project!

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!

I’m proud to share with you some results and metrics from a Lombardi customer that has done some truly amazing things with their labor distribution process, which dictates where grant monies are allocated.

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.

PRC, based in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, manages 14 domestic call centers and a handful of centers offshore.  In January of last year this 25-year-old company declared bankruptcy.  Six months later, after a massive restructuring they emerged from Chapter 11.

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.

We’re happy to announce that Aviva, the world’s 5^th largest insurance company, has selected Lombardi globally to support their strategic process improvement efforts.

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.

Last week we held our Driven Online virtual conference. It was the first time we hosted our user conference online. The conference ran three days with a mix of speakers from Lombardi, our customers and partners. We worked with eBizQ to leverage the Unisfair virtual conference environment. They both did a great job for us – but more on that in another post.

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.

Devin Rickard is a Senior Director of Business Process Improvement at Symantec, the company best known for its Norton line of security products.  The team that Devin belongs to acts as internal process consultants at the company and they’ve adopted Lombardi Blueprint as the common process modeling tool for the group.  What they found however is that Blueprint has a wide appeal beyond their group.

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.

Last year, the U.K. government mandated that national hospitals improve patient waiting times by nearly a third, and Lombardi customer University College London Hospitals (UCLH) suddenly found itself with a new challenge –  reducing the turnaround for hospital treatment for half a million patients from 26 weeks to 18 or less.

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.

Next week at the Gartner BPM Summit in San Diego, four Lombardi customers will be on hand to share their BPM success stories. Details of their presentations are below. Also, stop by and see us at booth #5 in the Solution Showcase or during the Lombardi “Price is Right” hospitality suite on Tuesday night.

• 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”

Over the the holiday break I chatted with Stacie Kenney, a Business Process Analyst with West Bend Mutual Insurance. West Bend is located in Wisconsin and has been around since 1894.  They offer property/casualty insurance for businesses, homes, autos, and personal property through independent agencies in six states.

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.