Business Transformation

Some questions explored – What is business transformation? What are the critical factors for success?

Business Transformation (BT) is different from “re engineering”. Primarily re engineering, according to Dr. Michael Hammer, advocated “Don’t automate – Obliterate”, in this day and age BT is focused on agility and adaptability.

Wikipedia’s definition – “making fundamental changes in how business is conducted in order to help cope with a shift in market environment”. A recent article in CIO magazine emphasized the role of the CIO and referred to BT as involving “significant changes to areas including business processes, core systems, channels, products, and services“.

BT is not just the application of new technology to the current business model, key attributes are:

• Across a variety of business functions
• Focus must other than cost reduction
• A clear and enduring emphasis on creating more value for customers

Successful BT needs to have a guiding vision which contemplates a fundamental shift of culture to assure greater agility and adaptability. It requires, at a minimum, half dozen key components for success as illustrated in Figure 1 below.

Value stream maps and a model of the entire customer journey (multiple customer touch points) can be central to evaluating and focus on customer value creation. A shared understanding of an outside in view is a typical funnel and measure for greater agility and adaptability.

Customer focused metrics emphasis key performance factors such as quality and service can help to shift management attention from internal company matters to what truly matters to customers.

Perfect order delivery, variance to promises for services provided, and first time right responses to inquiries and complaints are just a few of the customer centric metrics.

Each Executive leader must have a common understanding of the value creating processes across the full customer centric journey. IT as an enabler goes beyond improving efficiency to be a key driver in changing how business is conducted such that eventually the new set of tools, rules and methods become “the way we do things around here”.

The most robust BT efforts rely on multiple improvement methods and are predominantly IT driven, such as lean, TQM, JIT and Six Sigma, which are enablers of organisational performance and should be strategically linked with mission critical systems.

Shifting management attention from what each department contributes to overall corporate performance, to how departments collaborate for value creation is the final powerful lever. This can best be accomplished by overlaying the means for process based governance on the traditional organisation chart.

Similarly, the recognition of key people and the teams that make significant contributions to the progress of BT is equally important. In combination, these six business practices drive the needed customer focus and attention to cross functional collaboration that is needed to shift culture such that people eventually say “this is how we do things around here”.

The importance of IT, is becoming increasingly critical to successful BT and calls for new behaviors.

A checklist for CIO’s might include the following:

• Actively meets with the company’s customers
• Advocates and leads the mapping of the entire customer journey
• Regularly meets with internal customers
• Promotes a customer focused, business process view and encourages cross functional collaboration
• Use agile or lean IT methods of software development
• Applies tool sets such as Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) to drive business results
• Supports the CFO and other executives analytics and big data
• Takes a creative approach to the use of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
• Actively explores cloud computing solutions and social media
• The potential for Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) to make a significant contribution to business transformation is worthwhile noting.
• The key is to use all the features of a BPMS outlined in Table 1 and not just one or two of these.
• A Rules Engine to regulate the flow of information and activities
• Analytics Tools to allow managers to monitor key performance indicators
• A Process Engine to model the flow of business processes and automates manual activities.
• Document Management to assist users to search and store digital documents
• Collaborative Tools to facilitate the sharing of information through discussion forums and Portals

Business process management system core features:

• Rules engine to regulate the flow of information and activities
• Process engine to model the flow of business process (automate manual activity)
• Analytical tools to manage and monitor key performance areas/indicators
• Document management for storage and search
• Collaborative tools for knowledge sharing (discussion forums and portals)

The nett resulting benefits:

• Highlight end to end value creating business processes
• Create the capability to configure workflows and business rules
• Delivering real time business intelligence through advanced analytics
• Build the capability to deal with complex events
• Establish and monitor the critical customer facing process metrics relating to quality and timeliness

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The Yebotech solution incorporates all the mechatronic benefits and features, managing a company’s supply chain or infrastructure focusing on two important ingredients – people and assets!

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For complete document see reference and external link below.

External links:

Business Process Management – Wikipedia

Business Process management for Dummies – IBM

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