Recently, two Lombardi customers were interviewed by SearchCIO’s Manufacturing News as part of an article that discusses how manufacturers are using BPM [i.e., Lombardi Teamworks] to assist with making their supply chain more effective.

The article, entitled “BPM tools help firms bridge communications gaps in supply chains,” provides some interesting insight into how manufacturers can receive value from BPM. 

One of the customers is El Araby, an air conditioner manufacturer based in Cairo, Egypt. They had this to say:

 “Before Lombardi Software [BPM] was in place, all we could do for a customer was recommend them to the nearest service center and that was the end of it… We had no clue what happened next until the monthly report came out afterwards. Now, the Lombardi BPM software system handles all of the details of the repair process, even down to what technician is working on what appliance in what service center.”

We’re pretty proud that Teamworks customers around the world like to share such great testimony!

You can read the whole story here.

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.

In today’s economic environment, it is as important as ever to be able to provide hard metrics as proof of a successful BPM project.  This is not to mention that in general, metrics are the icing on the cake when making a case for further, organization-wide process initiatives (and to executives in particular).  Today, I want to dive further into that topic and discuss some of the common metrics businesses use, as well as the tangibility issues inherent to each.  The more familiar you are with presenting the value of a BPM project, the more likely you will be able to get executive buy-in.

Efficiency - How quick can we get it done?

Reducing the cycle time on a process, whether it is a new hire process or loan origination, provides value.  You can quantify the amount of time it took before the project and quantify how long each cycle takes after the process improvements.  Efficiency has a high tangibility factor, it’s measurable, and therefore remains the strongest, or most useful selling point when trying to achieve buy-in from other units in the organization.

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

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

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

If you’ve been reading the Process People blog, you might have noticed that we talk a lot about an iterative approach to deploying BPM. What we haven’t touched on as much is that the iterative approach is an element of the overarching methodology. Looking in on the methodology from the highest level you will get a view of a three-phased approach – which ultimately results in iteration. But we want to provide a big picture of how all of the different parts of our methodology tie together, and how each point of emphasis leads into or loops back to key areas of the other two phases.

I realize that in some organizations, “phase” is a four-letter word. With BPM it is a must… it is the foundational element that leads to continuous process improvement and ultimately maximum business benefit. But don’t just take our word for it, just look at the countless customers who have used this methodology and achieve enormous success because of it.

Definition Phase

The definition phase is probably the most critical portion of the entire BPM adoption lifecycle. This is where you set the expectations for the BPM project, define metrics to measure the project and create a framework so that the focus remains on delivering business value throughout all three phases.

In this phase organizations should:

• Take the broader initiative and narrow it to a specific departmental level
• Define the business milestones and associated metrics
• Develop the business case
• Ensure that there is a common thread throughout the whole project (Business value)
• Get the business to drive this phase

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In a previous post I said that it should go without saying that you have to showcase your initial BPM project if you want to drive adoption across the entire organization.  I focused on metrics.  Although other areas of the business might not understand the functional process implemented, they will find interest in how you are measuring the process for improvement.  This can correlate to other areas of the business as well.

Today I want to address the folks out there who don’t feel comfortable showcasing their project because they don’t have the biggest ROI numbers yet.  Maybe it has only been in production for a couple of weeks.  What else can you focus on?

The Before and After

What did the process look like before the solution and how has it changed?  Were there lots of manual hand-offs, faxes and emails?  Did participants have to log onto four different systems just to review a work item? Was there inconsistency in the way people executed the process?  How much time did managers spend building and running reports before status meetings?  What does it look like now?

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

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

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

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Showcasing the success of your initial BPM project is often times requested from other departments, but it’s also required to help drive adoption across the entire organization.

If showcasing your initial BPM deployment can help gain process adoption and ignite enthusiasm in other areas of the business, then you’ll get more and more value out of your overall BPM initiative. That being said, here is the first in a two part series of posts that will help you to showcase your BPM solution within your organization.

Get ‘em excited!

Everyone has had to sit in a presentation during their lunch break that seemed like a never-ending PowerPoint slide show. Now imagine watching someone explaining a process flow diagram that has no relevance to you. Then follow that with a “live” demonstration of someone clicking through a bunch of screens acting as a participant in the process that you didn’t get. Trust me, it can be very painful.

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Driven 2008 has come to a close, and we’re really thrilled with this year’s event. Many of the conference attendees stayed for the Lombardi golf tournament yesterday, which took place on the beautiful Fazio Canyons golf course at Barton Creek Resort and Spa. The weather was perfect and the golf was great.

On that note, I thought it might be timely to provide a quick recap of a session that Toby Cappello hosted on Wednesday. The session was called: “The Monday Morning Quarterback Discusses 10 Painful Lessons Learned.” Toby started things off with a golf analogy – one which he lived up to on the course yesterday!

The analogy went something like this: “BPM is like golf – you need to build muscle memory if you want to develop consistency and achieve success.”

In all honesty, I can’t really think of any other combinations of a technology (BPMS) and a discipline (BPM) that fits so perfectly with this analogy. It cuts to the core of Lombardi’s methodology. In fact, if you break it down even further you’ll see more uncanny parallels that help to visualize what exactly you’ll need to do to achieve success with BPM.

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