This morning we officially announced the Blueprint Spring ’09 update. The new release allows you to move beyond the realm of process mapping and documentation and to a place where every employee in your enterprise can contribute to process improvement efforts and actively make their jobs better.
Usually only a relatively small number of people inside an organization do real modeling of processes. The vast majority of us have “day jobs” and don’t necessarily think of things in terms of flow charts, activities, and decision points. How do we participate in the process improvement discussion?
Blueprint now leverages social networking technology similar to sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to build a community around business improvement that everyone–modeler or not–can participate in. “Participants” can reference and offer suggestions and feedback on their processes without the need to know any mapping or diagramming techniques. “Authors” can have threaded, two way conversations with the participants in the business and leverage Blueprint’s existing easy to use modeling capabilities to rationalize and improve processes. Tying this all together is a Facebook-style activity feed that proactively notifies you when your processes or the conversation about them changes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Last week, Gartner released the latest update to their BPMS Magic Quadrant. I am happy to tell you that Lombardi has been positioned in the “Leaders” quadrant in the report titled: ”2009 Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites.”
Gartner positions vendors in the magic quadrant based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. Delivering on both of these axes is the big challenge. Good quote from Rod Favaron – our CEO – on exactly this point: “From my perspective, leaders in this analysis must not only have a vision for BPM – they need to demonstrate success in executing that vision.”
2008 was the best year in Lombardi’s history. In 2009, execution is going to be more important than ever – not just for us. Our customers and partners need BPM now more than ever. We are looking forward to the challenge.
One of the great pleasures of delivering Blueprint as a SaaS application is that we’re able to stay flexible and update the product approximately every six weeks. To that end, we dedicated the February Update of Blueprint to fulfilling the top three customer requests we’ve heard over the past few months on the forums and out in the field.
Take a look at this screencast for a quick rundown or see the full details after the break.
Karen Tricomi, who is Systems Engineer, Enterprise Methods & Processes, for a major financial services organization, wrote a wonderful in-depth review of Lombardi Blueprint for BPMInstitute.org.
Entitled “The Process Practitioner: An Independent Evaluation Of Lombardi’s Blueprint,” the piece attests to how easy and useful Blueprint is for people of all skills levels. It also discusses each of the major product areas.
Karen writes:
“Documenting processes is the first – and in my opinion, the most important – step in the improvement cycle. When Lombardi recently offered to demonstrate Blueprint, their web-based documentation and collaboration product, I approached the demonstration as a business professional with processes that need improvement, rather than an IT analyst or industry expert. Criteria for evaluation were ease of use, a short learning curve, and good collaboration features.”
Yesterday I chatted with Dr. Joyce Statz who has been teaching a course at St. Edwards University in its school of management and business. Her course, “Multiple project and portfolio management” is offered as part of the Masters of Science in Project Management degree, and teaches how to manage multiple portfolios of project work in an organization.
I recently learned that Joyce introduced Lombardi Blueprint as a tool within her class and had a lot of success. I called her up to learn more.
Who are the students that make up her class and what are their backgrounds?
Mixing concepts with hands-on exercises
Replacing Visio/Word/Excel in the classroom
How the strongest Visio advocates at the beginning of the term became the biggest Blueprint champions at the end of the course.
Blueprint Educational Program
Lombardi provides free Blueprint subscriptions for educational use. If you are teaching or taking a course where you think Blueprint would be appropriate, please contact us at blueprint@lombardi.com to learn more.
When I was out at Cloud Connect a couple of weeks ago, I met Dan Woods who writes the JargonSpy column for Forbes.com. Turns out Dan has a particular soft spot in his heart for BPM and I was able to give him a quick demo of Lombardi Blueprint. The result was his piece that came out yesterday, “Stalking and Capturing a Business Process — We need a process for creating business processes.”
Be vewy, vewy quiet, we’re hunting pwocesses
Dan is clearly sold on the value of business processes and BPM:
For large and small firms, the business process is the right way to think of what to do and how to do it better, whether or not it is automated or supported with technology. BPM puts the focus where it should be–on what you must do to make your company successful, not on the capabilities you happen to have.
What he wants to know however is how are these processes captured in the first place? If the processes being submitted aren’t of quality, how can you expect the BPM results to be? Garbage in, garbage out.
Incremental and Collaborative…that’s the ticket
Dan argues that developing the processes incrementally is the only way you can be assured of solid inputs. The three approaches he advocates are: Wiki-based process discovery, Task-based process discovery and Mash-up based process discovery. And this is where the Blueprint shout out comes in:
Lombardi Software has recognized this trend and recently launched a Web-based service called “Blueprint” that allows for collaborative brainstorming and definition of processes. Using this service, you start with a bunch of ideas and can end up with a nice diagram. The JargonSpy imagines such a system could be used as the scratch pad for capturing and refining the processes that emerge in the other three methods.
Thanks for the mention Dan, and thanks for pointing out theimportance of iterative and broadly inclusive input collection up front. For without that, are we not building our BPM castles on diagrams of sand?
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.
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