Business of BPM

Next St. Louis User Group meeting

Thanks to Howard Webb (formerly with BPMG) who lives in St. Louis.  While I have been busy with a client, he has stepped up to drive the BPM User Group.  The next meeting is September 14th at St. Louis University.   

If you missed our last meeting at A.G. Edwards, we had two excellent presentations from Rich Phillips, COO of Maritz Travel and Jeanette Lynch, Business Process Management Lead at A.G. Edwards.

Location
The meeting will be in Room 253 a & d of the Busch Student Center.  This is right on the corner of Grand and Laclede.  Visitor parking is available in the parking garage on Laclede (there is a charge for parking, so plan accordingly).

Meeting
The meeting is shaping up to be another enjoyable and informative event with speakers from Lombardi and BP3.  One of the topics of interest brought up from our last meeting was metrics.  So, that will be our focus in September.

As usual we will begin at 7:30am and adjourn at approximately 9:00am.  There will be some time before and after to allow for networking and catching up with colleagues.

If you are interested in attending this event, please RSVP to me via email at hwebb@stratisltd.com by September 7th if possible.  Lombardi is providing the refreshments and we would like to have a close count by then.  Please send any questions to may have to the same address.

Agenda

Lean Six Sigma and BPM: The Power of Two
Speaker: Lance Gibb, President & CEO of BP3

Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt. www.bp-3.com

Lean Six Sigma (LSS) and Business Process Management (BPM) have much to contribute to each other. While Business Process Management and Lean Six Sigma can run successfully as parallel initiatives, companies that successfully connect these two initiatives will realize a competitive advantage. Lance is going to share real world examples of how Lean Six Sigma and Business Process Management can provide organizations with real value in the area of process metrics to better manage and optimize their business processes.

Common pitfalls in integrating Lean Six Sigma and BPM initiatives
How to leverage existing Lean Six Sigma practices and assets in BPM initiatives
How companies that are doing BPM can get started with Lean Six Sigma
How Lean Six Sigma practitioners can get BPM projects started on the right foot.

Business Process Management in Action
Speaker: Brandon Baxter, Senior System Engineer of Lombardi Software

Lombardi is a recognized leader by both Gartner Group and Forrester in the area of Business Process Management.

Brandon is going to follow up with a live demo of a customer implementation were you can see the capabilities of what BPM offers in action with a focus on the metrics of the process as well as the metrics around the people working with the process. You will learn how in using a Business Process Management (BPM) suite you can not only get control of your business processes but also get the visibility into your business process so as to make better business decisions and to be able to more quickly react to business events. Through the demo you will see:

How you can Define a business process
Measure how the business process is performing
Analysis how the business process is performing
Improve the business process
Control the business process

Management Frameworks

I have used this site a few times to look up concepts.  It is called Value Based Management.  It is a data dump of lots of theories.  One theory that I have been particularly interested in lately is called Blue Ocean Strategy.  I have not read all the press on it, but as one friend explained it to me, it is about collaborating with your clients to expand your market.  Rather than go out into new markets seeking new clients (which is the Red or Bloody Ocean), you focus on developing new growth through your client base.  This website above explains it a little different, but you can always go to the official website or read the book to get all the details.

Here is one of their tools called the Four Actions Framework:
To break the trade-off between differentiation and low cost and to create a new value curve, there are four key questions to challenge an industry's strategic logic and business model:              

• Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated?
• Which factors should be reduced well below the industry's standard?
• Which factors  should be raised well above the industry's standard?
• Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?

USAir Process Failure

Sometimes it is hard to find an example of a broken process, but fortunately, USAir made it very easy for me.  Yesterday, I get an e-mail from them informing them that I had lost my 50,000+ miles due to inactivity.  Certainly, it is hard to fly USAir direct to many of the cities I fly out of St. Louis, but I would have used the miles for something (if I knew I was going to lose them). 

Usually, I use them to visit my wife's grandparents in Philly.  Since her grandmother was recently put in hospice care, I imagined we would be using them soon.  I could argue quite strongly about whether they should be able to simply take miles that I have earned, but I won't go down that path.

Where I see the failure is in their communication to me.  I am sure I got some message about the change in program status from 36 months of inactivity to 18 months of inactivity.  It was probably buried in some other communication (or maybe I never got it).  But, they clearly could have informed me 3 months before the miles expired or 30 days before the miles expired.  Now, they simply get to hold my feet to the fire and force me to pay money for my miles, fly them to get the miles, or get one of their credit cards.

So, what can I do?  I don't know.  Maybe, I can get the Cranky Flier blog or some other advocates to bang on USAir?  Maybe, their SVP of customer service (Anthony Mule) will respond to my nice e-mail about helping me?  I simply asked them to extend this 30 days so I could use the tickets (likely for a funeral).  Maybe, I need to try someone else like their VP of Marketing (Travis Christ) or another executive?  I tried the call center which was nice enough, but (supposedly) not empowered to override this. 

Anyways, just an example of a big company failing to care about their customers and ignoring common sense to proactively inform them when it benefits them.