Here’s a summary of the highlights:

The new ARIS release provides social collaboration capabilities that leverage the wisdom of the crowd for process improvement and increased awareness and buy-in for your process excellence initiative.  Smarter analysis functions get more out of your existing process content and most notably  impact analysis has made a huge step forward. You want to see which IT system is supporting which process? This analysis is done in seconds and beautifully visualized. Cutting-edge user experience and self-explaining process visualizations will increase the process improvement footprint in your organization while central configuration, document management and license management/distribution will lower administration efforts. The new scalable private cloud architecture combines performance with maximum data security.

Process publication without the need to read a process model

ARIS Connect is a new product in the ARIS portfolio.  ARIS Connect generates process publication without the need to read an actual process model. With this anybody is now able to understand and improve processes.

Process modeling and social collaboration in ARIS Connect

In a process publication portal you can directly modify an existing process or design a new one. Need help? No problem, just start social collaborating to make the process better.

BPMN model in ARIS Architect

BPMN 2.0 is a first-class citizen in the new ARIS release. You can simulate, analyze, publish and export BPMN models.

Smart ad-hoc analysis in ARIS Architect

Let’s say you want to know which functions in a process are perfromed by Maria Lopez? Just use the ad-hoc analysis to find the answers in only a few seconds. Use the results to create output screens to share them in your organization.

Easy calculations and attribute maintenance

Spreadsheet is a new model type which looks simple but has a lot of power. Just drag and drop objects/processes on the grid and you can easily do calculations as you know it from Excel. If you change an attribute, it will also be changed in the models. You can directly create an ARIS MashZone dashboard on top of the grid.

I have been working with ARIS for more than 13 years now and I must say that this is by far the biggest step forward in ARIS history. So are you interested in finding out more?

- Visit our ARIS 9 website

- Attend our webinar series to see ARIS 9 in action

- Follow our ARIS blog on ARIS Community and read our post series focusing on the hottest ARIS features in the coming weeks.

The post ARIS 9 – The future of process is out now appeared first on Reality Check.

For those of you not familiar with Electrolux, it is a Swedish company with 58,000 employees in over 60 countries. They manufacture and sell cookers, ovens, dishwashers, laundry products, vacuum cleaners, air conditioners and products of professional use. The company has started to make the move from a manufacturing organization to a consumer-driven business which, as you can imagine, comes with its own set of challenges. The biggest challenge was to break up organizational silos to improve customer-facing processes in an end-to-end manner. Obviously you always step into someone’s territory if you improve processes end-to-end. For this, it was key to have the leadership team behind the project. This was exactly the case at Electrolux. Process improvement was seen more as a management discipline than technology. Management set the objective to make processes transparent and to simplify, improve, and manage them.

So for phase 1,

Jean started the project (initiated by a new ERP implementation) by creating a BPM framework defining governance, roles, communication, and methodology based on the C-level objective to simplify processes. With this, the process improvement initiative was nicely integrated in the corporate strategy and thus became a high priority in the organization. Because of this, teams directly approached the BPM competence center to support the mapping of as-is processes and to improve them. The competence center checked first which teams are interested in process improvement and chose them to participate first. Early results were used to convince the other departments to participate. After the collaborative process design/improvement exercise, done collaboratively by business and IT, the processes were implemented in an ERP system.

Phase 1 benefits for business…

- Processes gave visibility to the business and influenced other functions/silos transparent

- Now decision making is based on the full understanding of end-to-end processes

and for IT:

- Improved translation from business requirements

- Now ERP implementation is based on improved processes.

During phase 2,

the objective was to achieve higher process visibility. Electrolux wanted to see what was happening across the entire distribution network in real-time. They wanted to know: How many orders are coming in? Which orders are coming through which distribution center? Where are the orders coming from? Answers should be provided in real-time and filtered by product line.

The BPM team wanted to analyze trends so problems could be fixed before the customer discovered that there was an issue. Which is why having real-time information and analytics were a key part of their process improvement strategy. They could no longer wait for a daily shipment report; it was critical to identify problems in real-time and have the order corrected immediately. Understanding these requests created immense benefits.

To get the supply chain visibility they need, Electrolux chose iKnow from Software AG to define metrics and monitor KPIs gathered from the ERP system. iKnow at Electrolux is today providing visibility for:

Phase 2 benefits:

- Real-time information vs. a day old BI report

- Inventory issues found before consumers discover them

- Identify and correct process bottlenecks before the consumer is affected

- Helping the business to deal with exceptions instead of dealing with everything

During this initiative, Electrolux learned that by defining to-be processes before the ERP implementation and enriching the operational system with iKnow Process Intelligence, Electrolux got a supply chain solution that improves processes and provides actionable information. Jean also mentioned how important an appealing visualization of data is. Working with data is just more fun if it looks good. It also helps to use the dashboards to turn real-time data into real-time information and with this, turn them into real-time action. iKnow comes with very nice dashboards that really want to make you play/work with it. You find example dashboards for service level agreements, inventory management, and others here.

One of the key pillars of success for Electrolux was the collaboration between business and IT which isn’t always easy because they speak different languages and use different tools. But they realized they had the same objectives and by achieving end-to-end process visibility they are able to  move from a reactive to a predictive management approach. Having consistent objectives for business and IT helped a lot in getting both parties to work together and drive results.

In the next phase, Electrolux will move from the order-to-fulfillment process to order-to-cash, covering multiple channels. iKnow will be used for the BPM team as a follow-up step to process mapping.

A big thank you to Jean Lastowka for the great presentation! Me and the entire audience were really impressed with what the  Electrolux team was able to achieve in just one year.

You find further reviews of Gartner BPM Summit sessions in Sandy Kemsley’s blog: http://www.column2.com/

The post Process improvement and real-time supply chain visibility at Electrolux appeared first on Reality Check.

Let’s start with the age old question of, what’s required to get IT and the business aligned? And equally important, how do we keep them aligned beyond the first  meeting? It’s not as simple as asking the  business to describe their requirements as a process model. Although process models are a good start and an important  approach to build on, I believe we can get much closer to an approach that business and IT can follow together.

Here is the recipe I have in mind:

1. Tools alone are not sufficient enough for successful business / IT alignment and good project results. Solid project management and communication structures, together with a good methodology, are crucial if an organization hopes to achieve good results with Business Process Management.

•  Business people need a way to capture and document processes with all the elements important to them. The tool that supports this activity has to be usable by non-developers.

2. Processes that have been created by the business need to be communicated to IT in a way that they can use the model as a starting point for the technical implementation. Without having to re-model the process from scratch. So you need a model transition from a process design tool to a full-fledged developer environment without media breaks due to different model formats and such.

3. In the course of the technical implementation of a process, the model always gets changed (i.e., to illustrate exception handling, task locking, etc.). Now IT needs a mechanism to communicate these model changes back to the business.  Why? Because the business needs to be able to understand if the original intent of the process logic is still represented in the technical model.

4. Next you need a way of comparing the technical model to the original model and also a mechanism that allows the business user to approve or reject any changes in the technical model. This approval / rejection mechanism also implies that we need the ability to go back and forth iteratively between the line of business and IT during the process implementation phase until the result satisfies both sides.

Having such an iterative approach that works through bi-directional communication between the business and IT means that all subsequent change requests can be handled in a structured way. If the business has new ideas a few months later, the above mechanism would allow for transparent collaboration. Also, if the IT infrastructure changes these changes can be communicated back to the process owner on the business side.

5. For all of the above, it is important to route and track interactions between “the business guys” and “the IT guys”. Email notifications for all involved parties and task tracking of what needs to happen next with the process model will ensure delays due to a lack of transparency don’t become a problem.

6. Last but not least, the tools should provide transparency between the process lifecycle and the lifecycle of services, as well as the data model that feeds processes. This might not be obvious to everyone immediately, but trying to manage dependencies between processes and the underlying service landscape can become a huge challenge very quickly if you don’t have a good solution in place.

Do you think these 6 steps could help better align IT and the business in their quest to communicate the right requirements and have a successful BPM implementation?

The post It’s About More Than Just Getting the Requirements Right appeared first on Reality Check.

With the release of ARIS 9.0 only weeks away, I thought it would be timely to highlight some customer successes that exemplify the power of process improvement. If your organization has similar complexities and isn’t quite sure what approach might work, reference these example as a possible solution indicator.

German Ministry of Defense: Business Process Management in Big Organizations

The Bundeswehr is a very large organization with more than 190,000 employees. This includes men and women in uniform serving in the armed services and organizational departments. Furthermore, there are approximately 125,000 members of staff working as a civilian labor force, mainly in the armed forces administration and in support areas. The existing application landscape is rather complex and consists of more than 1200 applications that have to be converted to a single integrated solution based on standard SAP software.

The German military chose to implement standardized software based on processes more than ten years ago. This marked the beginning of a comprehensive evaluation of nearly all its business processes using ARIS. Process models today depict not only the work flows related to IT implementation, but also illustrate the relevant departments by way of end-to-end target processes.

Challenges

• Process standardization
• Process adjustment
• Integrated IT- landscape of administrative and logistical systems
• Removal of legacy system by 2013

Solution

• Concept and realization of SAP- reference based process models and value-added chains
• Implementation, test and rollout for targeted processes based on SAP
• Migration/ redemption of applications and data
• Consulting services needed to support the project

The initiative has the objective to move the existing IT islands to an integrated Standard Application Software Product Family – this is also the name of the project: SASPF. Here you see the basic concept of SASPF.

Lessons Learned

• External support for complex rollout-projects recommended
• Quality of Master Data is critical
• User-Care (User-Help-Desk, Advisor) is important
• Change management must be a management discipline
• Standardization and uniform guidelines is needed
• Effective support from general management

Deutsche Telekom: Methodological Approach to Business and IT Transformation Programs

Deutsche Telekom set out to radically reduce ERP systems and simplify the associated business processes in each subsidiary. This project was steered from the beginning with strong business sponsorships for a process-driven approach and for shared IT and business goals. Deutsche Telekom chose ARIS for process documentation and standardization.

Challenges

• Different processes / IT in each country
• Different customer experiences & lack of flexibility due to complex processes
• Different data models, manual reports
• Partly manual and individual processes
• Many ERP systems

Objectives

• Cross country harmony / standardized processes / IT
• Improve unified customer experience and increase service performance
• Improve cost structure and reduce time-to-market
• Innovation leadership in individual markets and partners
• One common data model, Single Point of Truth for KPIs
• Standardize processes and create one ERP IT landscape
• Create easier implementation of organizational changes

Deutsche Telekom´s overall process  improvement Lifecycle consists of 4 phases: Define, Assemble, Execute and Control. In the first two steps, process guidance as a standardized approach was established:

• Early commitment from the business for results
• Structured and committed requirements along with business processes
• Process model serves as a binding basis (template) for roll out in all countries

The next step is to pilot an integrated BPM tool chain in the laboratory. The objectives is to establish an agility layer for end-to-end processes, to monitor process performance with Process Intelligence and to analyze process and service performance according to KPIs.

Results

• Degree of process standardization: more than 80%
• Development of a group-wide ERP data model and process for maintenance
• Group-wide ERP IT Architecture developed
• Enterprise-wide portal concept developed

Lessons Learned (Dos and Don’ts)

Dos:

• Involve the business early
• Create a common criteria for standardization of measurement
• Create translation between business process view and IT standardization view
• Involve the national companies and C level support early

Don´ts:

• Use dogma method
• Use unaligned methodical decisions for single projects
• Use IT has the lead in the early phases (conceptual design)
• Have extensive tool discussions

To conclude with a quote from the project sponsor: Dr. Karsten Schweichhart, Vice President Group Enterprise Architecture / Deutsche Telekom AG: “On the long and exhausting way towards project success, it is strongly recommended that Business Architecture and IT Architecture share the driver seat in an aligned manner. We will never drive alone!”

Cable & Wireless: From Process Infancy to Enterprise BPM

Process Excellence is at the core of Cable & Wireless’s vision to be the mission-critical communications integrator. They elevated BPM from IT to a more strategic business level in the organization, and shared their experiences going from process infancy to Process Excellence. This customer story is interesting because of how Enterprise BPM factors into their plans, and what lessons they learned for strategic, transformational BPM programs.

Cable & Wireless simplifies process excellence to 5 components:

1. End-to-end process model: A single process asset with documentation standards. All processes housed in a central repository.
2. Process ownership: Every process has an owner who is held accountable for the measurement, control & outputs of this process.
3. Process control: All processes are held under a change control method balanced between central authority and local delivery.
4. Process measurement: Clearly defined efficiency & effectiveness measures are tracked for every process.
5. Performance improvement: A consistent and continuous improvement methodology to prioritize and execute a portfolio of inter- and intra-process improvement projects.

Cable & Wireless signed off on an investment in an enterprise-wide deployment of webMethods BPMS to implement and improve their critical processes based on these criterias:

• Criteria 1: Generate a positive ROI à Result: >£1M annualised hard benefits
• Criteria 2: Demonstrated demand beyond Quick Start à Result: 2 qualified projects – one from a quick start sponsor
• Criteria 3: Effective cross functional engagement during test drive à Result: IT BPMS Team and Process Excellence practice joined forces to deliver to internal customers

Best Practices

• Process Excellence is about the balance between effective process design, management and improvement
• Don’t lose focus of the two key Process Performers: People (owners & operators) & Technology (BPMS, Data, Development)
• BPMS is not about building new capabilities or installing a new IT platform – it is all about improving business performance
• BPMS may be an IT platform but it is NOT solely an IT initiative
• Agile Process – is not simply IT Agile Development it is about Rapid (governed) change from the business

To conclude with quote from the project sponsor, Mark Zirbser, Head of Operational Excellence at Cable & Wireless Worldwide: “Process Excellence is all about balancing effective process management on a daily basis with a drive for the improvement of process effectiveness & efficiency.”

You can see from these customer successes, process improvement solves many challenges and delivers real process improvement to all kinds of organizations. How has process improvement helped your organization? Did it help your organization deliver high quality IT solutions to meet business demands?

The post How Organizations Achieve Real Process Improvement appeared first on Reality Check.

The Deutsches Forschungszentrum fur Kunstilice Intelligenz (DFKI) examined three complex drivers for compliance externally imposed on organizations:

• heightened complexity of business processes with an increased number of process interfaces
• rising frequency of process changes
• a continuously growing amount of compliance regulations

To me, it’s obvious these drivers also drive process improvement but the question remains, “what should a process improvement/GRC platform provide to leverage synergies from both disciplines?”

#1 Technology:

A GRC solution should be built on a consistent set of data and should have a connector for all relevant regulations, requirements, and risks. The perfect connectors are processes. They visualize the relation between the assets; they enable impact analysis (which process is affected if a certain regulation changes) and they map GRC to operations and then to monitoring. The solution should also support workflows for defining, and communicating rules, instructions, controls and documentation of GRC activities. For more best practices in identifying the right GRC platform read, “Efficient Support for Internal Control Systems via a GRC Software Platform”  or visit the ARIS GRC lounge.

If you’re looking for a 3^rd party review of GRC platforms, download the latest Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance Platforms.

#2 Organization:

Technology is important but don’t forget the organizational integration. Blended teams of process improvement and GRC experts tend to get the best results. The benefits of bringing these teams together leads to better processes with lower and transparent risks, 100% regulatory compliance, faster and cheaper audits and overall higher security for less cost.

#3 Technology + Organization:

Process Improvement and GRC are one of a kind – both are about visibility, accountability and adaptability. As a matter of fact, many process improvement initiatives lead to higher risk and regulatory awareness and with this inherently define the purpose for GRC. The same principles apply to GRC. Many GRC initiatives lead to process thinking which drives the need for process transparency and management. The integration of process improvement and GRC technology as well as their blended teams are important for business success.

They don’t just need each other; they can’t exist without each other. Yes it’s true, GRC and Process Improvement are in love with each other. What about you? Do you have process improvement/GRC love stories to tell?

The post Does Governance, Risk and Compliance Management Love Process Improvement? appeared first on Reality Check.

• Stay laser focused: Focus on people-centric processes and the benefits they deliver.
• Make it a group effort: Ensure your project includes mass collaboration across departments and roles.
• Connect the dots: Join together social initiatives. Extend what’s already working.
• Socialize the benefits: Show people the value of being social and why it improves processes.
• Define the ecosystem: Delegate the roles and responsibilities. Use Wikipedia’s collaboration and governance model as an example.

And most importantly, if you’re driving a social initiative you need to be social yourself. Collaborate with peers, share ideas on the job and have a little fun. Want to start getting social today? Check out the BPM ecard design contest the ARIS Community is running until December 14th. Draft an ecard and win one of five magnetic ARIS symbol sets. Let your imagination run wild and come up with a design idea, no matter if its a photo, graphic, text or an ARIS Express Model. Details here.

The post Have You Enabled Social Collaboration? appeared first on Reality Check.

Over the last 20 years, integration grew to encompass more than just pure inter-connectivity. It grew to include: data, events, and processes. Integration vendors called the integration piece a “bus” and loaded the bus with MDM (Master Data Management), CEP (Complex Event Processing), and BPM (Business Process Management).

In the past 10 years technology evolved to make integration easier. On top of ease-of-integration, huge culture changes have influenced how we interact with technology. The first digital generation is hitting the workplace. Mobile and always-on behaviors are driven by consumers not workers. And, the implosion in the job market has caused a lot of deep changes in what people consider working.

Imagine that each of these SaaS/Cloud applications were those original enterprise applications. Only now, instead of connected across a corporate network, they’re connected across the Internet.

Now, picture the opportunity to rebuild the bus, data, events, & process integration stack internet-wide (with all the requisite changes that such an architecture demands).

Can I get a hallelujah?

The post Here’s the Opportunity appeared first on Reality Check.

Identify Your Allies

I love technology and I would guess many of you do too. Technology allows us to do things faster, more conveniently and more transparently. With the hope in improving our organizational performance but technology is just one pillar for improving business performance. Let’s not forget the people and the processes.

Involving the right people early and often in your process intelligence  initiative will help provide better transparency. It is true transparency can be seen as a scary thing but involving the people who have the most to gain and the most to lose will limit those fears. Don’t limit yourself to organizational domains. Involve the stakeholders to jointly define the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) so it’s clear what processes will be measured. Be sure to align with IT to understand where the data’s coming from, and bring both business and IT together to ensure you’re all working towards a common goal.

Know Your Course

How do you measure what you don’t know? It’s like a doctor recommending a treatment before you have a diagnosis. Start by measuring the “as-is” state, watch how your processes behave over time, identify the weaknesses and then think about a solution. (don’t go at it alone) When you’ve taken the steps and gathered process KPIs over time, you can validate your next move and make a strong case for future investment.

Commit to a Strategy

I can’t talk about the importance of KPIs enough but I think I missed one important point. It’s critical to map your KPI’s and your process performance to your corporate strategy. It shouldn’t be too difficult since operational processes, support the tactical objectives and strategic goals defined in your corporate strategy. Right?

Don’t feel bad if you can’t make the connection quite yet, what might seem easy in theory, is quite difficult in practice. Not many organizations have been successful ensuring their corporate strategy directly impacts their process performance KPI’s. Which is what makes process intelligence so important, not to mention it’s a management’s dream.

Share your steps to Process Intelligence, we’re all looking for a smoother road to success.

The post The Forgotten Principles of Process Intelligence appeared first on Reality Check.

But it was the customers I’ve worked with over the past 15 years that gave me the Reality Check I needed to realize the full value of BPM and SOA together. Their use cases helped me understand the next evolutionary phase of business process was moving beyond automation to create flexible business processes. Companies that get the most out of their BPM efforts have identified the ‘Top 10 Reasons to Use SOA as a Foundation for BPM.’

1. Automate processes across business functions: Processes that need to execute across functions are often hampered by a lack of interoperability of underlying systems. SOA services eliminate such issues by provisioning standard interfaces to automate processes.
2. Automate new processes with greater speed: With a well-designed SOA that exposes business capabilities as services, new processes can be quickly implemented simply by wiring process steps to the correct services.
3. Change processes quickly in response to business needs: With loosely coupled SOA services, re-wiring a process step from one service to another can be done with minimal impact to the rest of the process and can even help analyze the feasibility of proposed changes.
4. Avoid costly business errors:  Businesses can reduce risks by using proven SOA services to implement business processes that are robust and less prone to errors.
5. Focus on improving business processes—not integrating systems: SOA services abstract out the complexity of underlying systems, enabling BPM to focus solely on improving processes.
6. Align IT investments with business needs: With an SOA, it is straightforward to prioritize building services needed for key business processes and to establish service-level KPIs. That maximizes not only the alignment with business needs but also the return on IT investments.
7. Adapt running business processes dynamically: With an SOA, it is possible to establish a layer of mediation to dynamically match the process step to the right service and enforce any SLA based on the context.
8. Gain deeper visibility into your business: Implementing business processes on an SOA foundation means the business services are executed as business transactions flow through the process. By placing probes on these business services to collect service performance and other metrics, companies can gain real-time visibility into their business that otherwise would be hard to achieve.
9. Adopt cloud-based services faster: Do you want to quickly innovate your processes by incorporating a Software as a Service (SaaS) application or a specialized Application Program Interface (API) from a cloud vendor? With the right SOA infrastructure in place, both internal and external services are used the same way at the process-step level.
10. Deliver business processes via mobile devices: With an SOA, companies can expose needed capabilities through a mediation layer between mobile applications and internal systems. This method helps preserve the integrity of internal systems and provides a way to enforce other quality of service requirements.

By using SOA as a foundation for BPM, companies across the globe continue to achieve better customer service and become more competitive by breaking down organizational silos and automating systems and processes across lines of businesses. If you have a lesson learned by implementing SOA as the foundation to your BPM efforts, I’d like to learn from you and I’m sure others would as well. Please share your thoughts here.

The post SOA and BPM, A Perfect Complement appeared first on Reality Check.

Where’s the Business Value?
Identify what you’re going to measure first. Knowing what to measure is important because what you measure is what you are going to try to improve. In this case, you need to focus on the metrics that will deliver real business value. Everyone starts off with the right intentions but if you derive the wrong actions from the wrong KPIs, you might harm your organization more than help. This is one of the most common stumbling blocks I see in any Process Intelligence initiative.

Where’s the Focus?
There are tons of processes and KPIs to measure across any organization but don’t go crazy. Understand the power of measuring operational processes but don’t try to measure every KPI, or worse your favorite KPIs, or even the ones which you consider the easiest KPIs. Focus on the KPIs that will provide insight into the processes you want to improve. The purpose of Process Intelligence is to improve business performance. Find out which KPIs are essential for your business and which processes impact those KPIs. Measure those processes by picking the most important KPIs for the process. Sometimes it’s best to simply start with one process and grow over time.

Where’s the Stakeholders?
In a Process Intelligence project you measure KPIs to see how your operational processes are performing with the goal of transparency. You might love it – others might not. So to avoid conflicts later involve all key stakeholders early. And be sure to involve both business and IT people. Without the support of business, you’ll struggle to understand the business process, making it hard to identify the right KPIs. You need IT’s support to set up your Process Intelligence software and to extract the KPIs out of the different systems. Most importantly, both sides should see the Process Intelligence project as a partnership. Everyone should look forward to using the tool to improve performance and better position their requirements in the organization.

Avoid these 3 stumbling blocks and become part of the 32% not the 24%.

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