Business Process Improvement Just Got Personal

Businesses are personalizing everything nowadays because people want something specially made for them. Quite frankly, they deserve it. No one wants a cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all solution to life, but until recently had to settle for mass-produced goods and services. Our society does not live by the ideas in Ayn Rand’s Anthem, where use of the word “I” would result in deathly punishment.

Each individual has a specified role at your job and companies need to see the importance in each individual. We have the capability to complement complex infrastructure needs with a solution that helps human collaboration and documents the people and the process of a business.

There Should Be an “I” in “Team”

There never was a company with all of their employees doing the exact same job. No matter how big or small, each business assigns roles to people, and each of these processes need to be managed effectively. [Read more...]

Fighting Tomorrow’s BPM Battles Today

Companies experience significant inefficiencies and they know it. Too often, the decision is made that it’s too difficult, too political, and too disruptive to operations to do more to manage how work gets done. Just as often, people won’t stop to capture process in flight because they believe it will change by the time it gets published. People learn to live with these problems and think, “It will always be that way.” We’re going to show you why that statement isn’t true.

Becoming Lean is the New Battle Strategy

Under pressure from global economic challenges, many countries are making huge defense cutbacks, including the UK and US. The Pentagon, for example, is facing a spending reduction of nearly $500 billion over a decade, with an additional $110 billion in automatic cuts to military. With this in mind, defense companies like BAE Systems must become leaner in everything they do. So that’s exactly what BAE System’s Finance Services did. As a part of a shared services initiative at the company, they documented over 280 processes and 330 work instructions to facilitate their Finance Transformation program.

Shared Services Play a Major Role

Every large business has services common to many departments across geographies, so it makes sense to integrate these services into a single entity, commonly known as a Shared Service Organization(SSO). In the early days, when SSOs were being formed, the main role was to increase operational efficiencies and reduce costs. These objectives still remain, but as SSOs have made ground as independent bodies, their focus has shifted to matters necessary for growth. Employees want easy-to-understand, rich process content delivered through a personalized, role-based portal that enables them to do the right thing at the right time; what one might call an “Intelligent Operations Manual.” This provides a better understanding of process by giving stakeholders a single source of the truth that aligns business with IT.

What Were BAE’s Results?

The result (which BAE calls “How2″) offers continuous improvement and service excellence as well as process and control governance for their customers. It’s helped them achieve significant savings in cost per finance transaction. With easy-to-use software, capturing and deploying best practices as a codified business processes is logical. By deploying a best of breed business process management platform for a single and integrated version of truth, you can detect, register, and unify processes.

“To bring How2 into BAE systems was extremely easy. It has actually been one of the easiest implementations I have seen for a while . . . we could trust it.”
- Guy Keough, P2P Manager.

For more information on BAE Systems, click here

For more on how to integrate your systems to leverage Big Data, check out these Gartner reports:

Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Systematic SOA Infrastructure Projects

Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Systematic Application Integration Projects

Just How Random is Your Workplace?

Companies put a great deal of focus on goals and strategies and, often, less effort goes into the tactics and guidance for how work actually gets done. In reality, there’s a personal aspect to what we do that should be understood so that it gets done right and quickly. If you’ve seen the viral video for the Harlem Shake, it illustrates what too many companies look like under their corporate covers.

Doing the Harlem Shake

Enjoy this short video (you may want some sound):

Doing your own thing

What makes the video so entertaining is that everyone is doing his or her own thing. Water cooler guy? …is that guy punching a giraffe? Some have great moves while others look like dancing isn’t really their “thing.” Just like how the company logo can be the only commonality, the beat is in this video is the only thing uniting this group of people. [Read more...]

You Are Micromanaging and Need to Stop

Business Process Improvement

Continuous improvement, consistency and collaboration are the ways process is managed effectively. Without it, you’re just a micromanager.

Making it Better

Business Process Management (BPM) is absolutely necessary to any company, but what’s the point if you don’t use what you know to improve? There also needs to Business Process Improvement that takes managed processes and makes it better. There is always room for improvement. Everything can get better and with the right tools, help and support, anyone and anything can improve.

Strengthening Weakest Links

Employees may or may not have the same skill-set, but they should all have a firm understanding of their position and role within the company. It is vital to ensure that business processes are handled in a way all employees easily understand. Work becomes easier, faster, and more rewarding when all your company’s employees know they are following the right process, at the right time. [Read more...]