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
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.
RecentlyBPM:redux posted an interview with our very own Wes Chung. Wes is one of Lombardi’s Alliances Managers. In the post, Theo Priestley discusses various topics with Wes about Lombardi’s vision for BPM, its evolution to date and more. There are some really great comments worth summarizing here in Process People.
Expectations for 2010 After a Fairly Turbulent 2009
We saw companies strategically select BPM as a means to improve their operating efficiency and also to position themselves competitively for eventual market condition improvements. In 2010, we are expecting that there will be an increased oversight and due diligence on how money actually gets spent.
Training and Education Services
We have expanded our offerings for both on-site and virtual classroom-style skills enhancement. Lombardi University covers all of the roles needed in a BPM program and at all of the skill levels for different responsibilities that exist.
Blueprint
Our customers are using the tool to improve their understanding of their processes and to drive process changes. Blueprint has the ability to:
Identify differences between operating branches or geographical units
Standardize best practices and operating procedures
Manage candidate projects across the portfolio of BPM initiatives
In case you missed it, we published an article in the latest issue of Workforce Management that might be of interest. The article is entitled “A Simple Approach to Documenting your HR Process” and it is filled with statistics and tips for getting your HR processes documented and streamlined.
A recent study by Staffing.com revealed that 70% of applicants and 28% of hiring managers are dissatisfied with how their hiring processes work; and that is just one of the many critical processes in your company. Effective documentation of your HR processes can lead to impressive savings and a large reduction in your company’s overhead.
Optimizing your HR processes is critical for saving time, avoiding errors and reducing company overhead. The absolute best way to save time and money is through process documentation. If you are interested in finding out how to quickly document and streamline your key processes, there is a simple next step. Just click the link below to download the full white paper.
Ready to start documenting your processes now? To effectively document your processes, you will need the right tool. Click here for a free trial of Lombardi Blueprint, the easiest process documentation tool on the market.
Rachel Pace-Maron, Director of Operations Support Service at PRC, was asked to document, standardize and communicate all of her company’s processes to help improve business processes across 15 domestic and 5 international call centers.
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.
Last week, the Financial Times (FT) digital business reporter Stephen Pritchard published a podcast interview with Toby Redshaw, the CIO of global insurance giant Aviva on the importance of business process management.
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!
It’s Business Process Management conference season right now. Over the next 4 weeks, Lombardi and our customers will be participating in quite of few conferences around the world – spreading the news about how BPM can help companies to quickly improve their processes and gain efficiencies.
This week it was the IRM BPM summit in London. Aviva, one of our large insurance customers, spoke about how they are using BPM to get measurable results across their organization.
Next week we are back at it at the Gartner BPM Summit in Orlando Florida, with seven Lombardi customers speaking about their BPM projects. If you are attending this one, you are in for a real treat – we have executives from Lincoln Trust Company, Wells Fargo, Medical University of South Carolina, Foreign Currency Exchange Corp. and others sharing their experiences and best practices for “How to succeed with BPM.”
But the world tour doesn’t stop there. We’ll also be at Forrester’s Business Technology Forum in Chicago next week where another customer, SIRVA, will be sharing their perspective on how BPM helps them drive world-class customer experience in the corporate relocation business.
Finally, we will be rounding out the conference season with Phil Gilbert speaking at a Banking event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as well as participating at both of Gartner’s Symposium/ITXpo events in Orlando, Florida and Cannes, France.
And that’s how you go around the world in 30 days with BPM. Pretty busy schedule, but certainly worth it because we feel that every company can benefit from process improvement if they take the right approach. We hope to see you at one of the events.
As the manager of our BPM Consultants, I get to see literally dozens of interesting customer use cases. One particularly interesting insurance customer recently described an example of their business processes where the decision being made within the process is as important (actually even more important) than the speed at which the work is being done. That is quite an amazing testament to power of BPM when you think about it.
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:
Visibility – Show me information in a human-consumable format. It needs to provide details that can be understood by mere mortals.
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.
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 the late19th Century, FWT studied the gainful organization of work within the corporation, from a structured, ordered perspective. In his view, there were two types of people engaged in this endeavor. Those who do the work, and those who manage the work. Put simply, the work of the workers is to do. And the work of the managers is to think. Managers do not work; they control work. And workers do not think, they do. Managers = Brains. Workers = Brawn.
Here is a Taylor quote from Wikipedia that nicely illustrates the viewpoint:
“I can say, without the slightest hesitation, that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the science of handling pig-iron.”
Now don’t get me wrong. I have a lot of respect for FWT’s pioneering efforts in the field of business theory and as a management consultant.
But now, BPM, a Three-Letter-Acronym, has killed him dead.
I’d like to share this video that one of our Business Process Management Analysts, Nachi Chidambaram, recently created. Blueprint can be hard to explain to new users because it’s so different from any other product out there. Unlike Visio or Word, there’s no emailing files around and wondering what the latest version is. Plus it’s easy to pick up Blueprint and start making compelling process documentation without needing to take a big training course first.
Check out the video below. Nachi does a great job explaining what makes Blueprint is different how it makes your job of documenting processes easier. And just like the product, the video is quick and easy to understand!
BPM project durations are usually measured in weeks-to-months – not months-to-years. With this velocity, you can’t afford to get stuck in the rut of traditional “define & design” techniques based on multiple rounds of 1-on-1 analysis meetings. In fact, I’d go so far as to label this as rework which increases a project’s cycle time!
I’m an enthusiastic supporter of the workshop format, where not only speed, but also quality, visibility and buy-in are greatly enhanced compared to the 1-on-1 approach. You could say it’s a way of applying process improvement methods to the way we carry out process improvement itself (or “PI2” as I like to call it).
In a previous blog, I shared some secrets of success for the “2 x 6 workshop“. One of the critical success factors is utilizing a facilitator – “an impartial, objective analyst to run the session, keep it crisp and in-focus”. Let’s dive into that a bit more. Why do we need the facilitator role, how does it add value to the process of process improvement, and how can it be done well?
Rachel Pace-Maron, Director of Operations Support Service at PRC, was asked to document, standardize and communicate all of her company’s processes to help improve business processes across 15 domestic and 5 international call centers.
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