Several months ago, I got an urgent request from OMG – the organization responsible for BPMN and other BPM standards – to give a short blurb I had written a permanent URL on my website.  The...

Case Study: BPM Drives Enterprise Agility

Hy Cite is a dual-facet organization that produces premium house wares, soccer equipment and apparel, and offers consumer financing services for direct-selling companies. Since implementing BPM, Hy Cite's revenues and net earnings increased four fold, receivables and distributors increased three-fold, while total revenues tripled. The number of Full-time Employees (FTEs) increased 50% in management, 400% in programming/development, 100% in systems analysis, 200% in system administration, and 300% in information technology. Collections for loan delinquencies have gone down 400% because of the increased ability to document and verify on the financial side. Because the company uses independent distributors, Hy Cite does not have the ability to directly affect sales.
For Hy Cite's BPM initiative, the goal was to automate the business processes and have better collaboration between people and the application software, using technology to achieve a competitive advantage in the market. The BPM framework is a "fabric layer" that exists below all the organization's divisions and units.

Brost covered several case studies in his presentation. The first was the BSUSA Partnership for increased external financing. The goal was to add value for both partners and reduce cycle times. The BPM requirements were:
• Order-processing functions and visibility
• BSUSA host integration
• Short project lead times

The BPM initiatives were:
• Workflow design and automation
• Short-term resource dedication
• Long-term resource integration
• Leverage most experienced SMEs (Subject Matter Experts)

The issues in this partnership included extending the processes and process visibility to third parties by using modeling and simulation while benchmarking and measuring the service levels. The results were consistently high service levels, lower cycle time, less loan delinquency, and increased orders processed per week with lower staffing levels.

The next case was verifications scripting to increase quality of first contact with the consumers. The goals were to:
• Increase consistency and uniformity of initial customer contact experience
• Decrease new verifier training time
• Decrease new customer cancellations
• Maintain customer contact performance measurements

The verifications scripting BPM requirements were:
• Multi-lingual application
• Application simplicity
• Workflow queues/work lists
• Short project lead time

The main issue was to change the corporate attitude so that if there are problems, the process is blamed and not the people. Process documentation was made better and more complete. This was difficult to implement, and took some time to get it right. The results were:
• Reduced customer cancellations
• Reduced verifier turnover
• Faster and greater ease of training
• Uniformity in customer contact
• Assistance during peak periods

The third case Brost covered was Mexico financing. This was an initiative to provide consumer financing services in Mexico. The goals here were:
• Underwriting compliance
• Leveraging Mexico office resources
• Minimizing lead time to credit decisions
• Portfolio performance

The BPM requirements were order processing functions, Web services and process balancing. The issues encountered were:
• Freezing BPM project requirements was necessary
• Scope creep was a problem
• 80/20 rule (be careful not to over automate)
• Enhanced software functionality  (check with your vendor for the latest software)
• User acceptance

The results for this project were better staff-level requirements and more orders per week with greater portfolio performance.

Brost touched on a final case study that enhanced distributor self-service through Web services access for distributors while maintaining quality metrics and leveraging the existing workflow structures. Processes were extended to the customers with increased visibility and orders were increased while distributor service customer contact time was reduced.

Brost said that they focused on the people, the processes, and the software, and that in order to do this right, it has to be done end to end.

Arin Brost recently spoke on this topic at BPMInstitute.org's Business Process Management Conference.  For more information on this conference, visit www.BPMConference.com

To hear the archived audio file of this presentation, visit: http://www.bpminstitute.org/presentations/featured-presentation/article/case-study-bpm-drives-enterprise-agility.html

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