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...]

How Einstein Would Have Managed Process

Sometimes change is so gradual yet so ubiquitous that we don’t see the enormous implications of what’s really happened until somebody says it in a new way. I recently had such an experience when I read Google’s Michael Jones on How Maps Became Personal in the Atlantic.  A lot of the ideas in this piece jumped out at me, but the one that really got me thinking was:

Effectively, people are about 20 IQ points smarter now because of Google Search and Maps. They don’t give Google credit for it, which is fine; they think they’re smarter, because they can rely on these tools. It’s one reason they get so upset if the tools are inaccurate or let them down. They feel like a fifth of their brain has been taken out.

It’s Personal

The change Jones talks about was brought about by taking static maps and making them personal, AKA tailored to the person using them in a way that makes everyone a “local,” an instant expert. Smarter.

I had that experience today driving back from Palo Alto to SFO. The Google Maps iPhone app remembered my previous travels and offered me two choices with predicted travel times differing by 20 minutes. I could see the red areas where traffic was heavy and what to avoid. Armed with this real-time insight, I selected the 280 North and a small side road that got me to my destination almost to the predicted minute. [Read more...]

NFU Mutual Automates Paper Processes with TIBCO Solutions

Business process improvement initiatives can yield efficiencies that have a direct impact on the bottom line. For NFU Mutual, the decision to automate its paper-based claim processing workflow is already starting to bear fruit. Whereas before, supervisors would distribute the incoming paper claims manually, the steps behind NFU’s claims processing are now orchestrated by TIBCO BPM solutions, and incoming claims are being automatically allocated to its agents. The system is smart enough to know when to route the claims to other offices if a particular office is swamped by high volumes of claims triggered, say, by a local disaster.

Since implementation, NFU has seen improved efficiencies, including a reduction of some 4,000 paper files, which in turn has freed up office space. Meanwhile, supervisors are free to focus on high-value assignments rather than allocate claims to employees, and backlogs are minimized as claims are being routed to offices with lighter loads. NFU Mutual is using TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM, TIBCO Nimbus and TIBCO Spotfire to optimize its claims-handling process.

For more, check out this feature article  in Computerweekly.com.

The Toughest of Tests: What Businesses Can Learn from Olympians

To really excel and beat the competition, it requires more than a spark of inspiration and talent. It requires focused effort. The sporting world has shown that, and we’ve all been reminded of it hearing the personal stories of the medalists in the recent Olympic games.

Better practice = better performance

Coaching and training techniques have been refined and improved, which is part of the reason we’ve seen World and Olympic records shattered. And while advanced and novel training techniques are not limited to sports, they do have one common theme: they all make the activity more difficult than it is really is. Let me give you a couple of examples:

Football: one of the reasons that Brazilian footballers are so good, is not just natural talent or the poor economic conditions, but they all play futsalIt is played with a smaller, heavier ball and a smaller pitch. The maths tells the story. Futsal players touch the ball far more often than soccer players – six times more often per minute. The smaller, heavier ball demands and rewards more precise ball control. “No time plus no space equals better skills.”

Table tennis: multi-ball coaching techniques brought in by the Chinese. Simply put, multi-ball is the training technique that has coach use a number of balls to set up a training drill for the practicing player. Most players think of multi-ball almost as a torture technique, where the trainee is reduced to a small puddle of sweat as the feeder keeps him constantly moving all over the table chasing the ball and gasping for breath. And while using multi-ball to build fitness is one aspect of the technique, there are several other benefits: technique, footwork, decision making and psychological strength.

Better business practice

In business we do not “practice.” Every day we go to work we are “in the game,” rarely with a coach, a game plan or any time to reflect on our performance.

But business is not a zero-sum game. In sports, to win, your opponent needs to lose. In business, that is not the case. If an individual can raise their game, it can be replicated by other team members. The collective performance gains can be huge. So why are proven techniques from sports not used in business?

As one business expert put it, “Very few businesses have put the principles of ‘purposeful practice’ into the workplace. Sure, the hours may be long in some jobs, but the tasks are often repetitive and boring and fail to push employees to their creative limits beyond. There is little coaching and objective feedback is virtually non-existent, often compromising little more than a half-hearted annual review.” [Read more...]

Patient Safety: Going Well Beyond a Checklist

Patient Safety WeekWith National Patient Safety Awareness Week coming to a close, we thought we would give some attention to this important topic.

In following this week’s articles, blog posts and tweets, much of the discussion about patient safety has centered on the treatment a patient receives during a procedure or hospital stay, so we asked Dr. Gary Ferguson, one of TIBCO’s Chief Healthcare Strategists, for his perspective. In his words he feels strongly that: “Many of these approaches are treating the symptoms, and not the cause.”

This is a good point. Take for example the case of hospital readmissions.  It’s well known that CMS will begin penalizing hospitals if their readmission rate exceeds standards.

So what should caregivers be focused on in order to achieve patient safety, and how does technology fit into the overall goals? [Read more...]

BPM and Healthcare — Why Has It Taken So Long?

 

Healthcare is going through an unprecedented change. Some of the change is forced by external regulatory mandates and some by rising costs and a sense that if we don’t do something soon, out-of-c0ntrol costs will force even more change from the outside. It would be easy to call this a crisis moment, though crisis implies impending collapse. Rather than collapse, the more likely outcome without any detour off the current path is greater impact to the people who pay the heavy costs for the system as it is.

[Read more...]

Does Generation Z have a Two-Second Advantage?

What happens when a whole generation that has lived their entire lives with the ability to feed information to themselves (and at a time and format of their choosing) becomes the dominant group in the workforce? What happens when this group of entirely social, entirely digital, entirely in-command-of-their-world workforce is running the critical elements of how we conduct business? This will be the first time in history that a group has gone birth-to-business with their hands firmly on the wheel of information technology.

The simple life

We grew up being fed information. We learned from our parents, teachers and the evening news. We knew exactly and only what we digested from people, books and a limited amount of video. College was no different and certainly the workplace was the same. There was a time and place for each step of the way, and it was defined and scheduled by other people. “Happy Days” could only be seen one night per week and if you missed it, it was gone forever. You took certain classes in your first semester of college because that’s the only way you’d be finished before graduation.

[Read more...]