Business of BPM

BPM to help OSS

I was reading a recent study from Amdocs about OSS (Operational Support Systems).  The press release was about inadequate OSS affecting time to market.  It identifies several reasons:

1. Lack of visibility to business processes;
2. Legacy system issues; and
3. Data issues.

This seems like a great BPM opportunity. 

The press release says "The survey revealed that service providers currently face significant operational challenges when attempting to roll-out new services such as Virtual Private Networks (VPN), Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The systems to support these complex new services are struggling to keep up; 77 percent of service providers stated that legacy systems are unsuitable for meeting the needs of today’s customers, and that these systems are not equipped to quickly introduce new services. Additionally, issues such as a lack of visibility into business processes and systems, shortfalls of legacy systems and data management have negative impact on cost, fallout rates and time to market."

Healthcare Examples

Here is a message I pulled together for the HC CIO...

Have you seen the improvements and ways that Business Process Management (BPM) is being used in the Healthcare industry?  BPM is one of the latest approaches in continuous improvement that blends technology with process.  Rather than focus on total reengineering, BPM improves the efficiencies of your current or streamlined processes and helps you leverage your existing assets.  Given the staffing constraints across healthcare and other industries, this can give you an opportunity to grow your company without adding staff. 

Some examples:

1. Veteran’s Health Administration is using BPM to improve their benefit eligibility process focusing initially on income verification.

2. Gaston

   Memorial

   Hospital

   is using BPM to reduce the time to post job openings internally and has gotten it from days to seven minutes.  Gaston has also started using BPM for patient incident reporting and approval of new medical forms.
3. Lee Memorial Health System used BPM to cut their recruiting time by 50% and reduce new employee record creation from 9 hours to 10 minutes.
4. A 500-bed hospital is using BPM to manage their dietary management system reducing errors while assuring continued accreditation and improving patient, family, and physician satisfaction. 
5. A payer is using BPM to streamline their appeals and grievance process to improve accuracy, consistency, and timely resolution.
6. Another payer is using BPM to increase the efficiency of their call center allowing them to increase membership by 48% without an increase in staff.
7. Another payer is using BPM to manage their provider credentialing process from application capture through case resolution.

Some other examples of how BPM could be used include creation of a virtual EHR, accounts receivable, coordination of benefits, capturing process level metrics, contracting, procurement, product management, and project management.

BPM can help you increase quality while lowering the cost of care and provide a technical, rules-based solution for managing processes and their exceptions.  Additionally, given your historical investments in disparate systems, BPM serves as an abstraction layer that overrides your existing architecture so that changes can be made on an ongoing basis with massive development efforts and many implementations are made within 90-days from process mapping to production.   

BPMS Selection Criteria - Your Thoughts

I am working on the content for our webinar next week on picking a BPMS.  I thought I would open the topic up for discussion here to hear your thoughts.

• What are the critical architectural components?
• What is critical about the modeling environment?
• Are there certain integrations which you expect to be pre-built?
• What consulting services do you expect to come with the software?
• Does simulation matter?
• Do you care about BPMN or BPEL or other standards?
• Do you expect document management to be part of your BPMS or not?
• How close should the BPMS be tied to Microsoft (i.e., Outlook)?
• What type of BI reporting will you use?  Does the BPMS need to feed your data warehouse?

BPM and Event Planning

I was running a ½ marathon this past weekend and began thinking about the whole event management industry.  This includes everything from travel to meetings to weddings to charity events.  The amount of coordination which occurs is amazing, and the risk is always keeping the branding, messaging, and information up to date across the value chain. 

Imagine being responsible for an event like a wedding.  Ideally as the couple, you would like to have a dashboard view of the process which showed you all the following information:

• Open tasks and who they are assigned to (e.g., sister, mother, mother-in-law)
• Ongoing invitee and attendee list
• Proposal management process with vendors (e.g., photographer, video, caterer) allowing you to manage the bid process and contracting process

The advantages of a process management solution to wedding planning would be a personalized portal view for each participant showing them relevant tasks and allowing for collaboration across tasks.  It would keep everyone aware of guest count and any last minute changes (e.g., due to weather things are moved inside 24 hours before the event in which case everyone should be informed via e-mail, text message, etc.).

These same concepts apply to things like corporate events.  One of our big events at Express Scripts was our annual Outcomes conference where we flew in about 750 of our top clients to

St. Louis

to talk about trends in the pharmacy benefit management space.  Internally, there was massive coordination for all of us speakers.  We had to coordinate research with our finance people and statisticians.  We had to pull together slides and do dry runs and incorporate feedback.  Additionally, lots of this was memorialized in a book that was distributed at the conference. 

A BPM tool would have done the following for us:

• Provided a dashboard for marketing to coordinate invites going to clients, status of content, status of dry runs of presentations, and other preparations for the event
• Allowed speakers to own the logistics for their meetings and coordinate with the facility planners around the event to make sure that if we changed to a panel from a presentation that this was updated and the room re-configured
• Provide a process flow for legal, marketing, and client sign-off on presentations and an audit log for what happened

Design Change Notification

When we first started the DCN (Design Change Notification) project with Ameren, I did not realize it was a standard process in the industry (and other industries).  It is a reasonably complex process at companies that makes a lot of sense for BPM.

Change notification is about managing the process of identifying changes, capturing the changes, tracking the signoffs, tracking the change specifications (versions, notes, drawings, calculations), and tracking the status of the changes. 

This was also a typical example of the speed to market that we talk about with clients around BPM.  Within 10 weeks, we were able to take a Visio diagram, finalize requirements, build out a LDAP integration for SSO (single sign-on), build two custom integrations, conduct UAT (user acceptance testing) and go live.

Obviously, at some companies where the changes affect suppliers and subcontractors, the effectiveness of this process, the timeliness of the process, and the control of document versioning is critical.  This makes DCN an even more relevant BPM project.   

Upcoming Webinar

Speakers:

John Lojek
Director of Marketing &
Solution Strategy
Appian

George Van Antwerp
Vice President
Talisen Technologies

Webinar: "Technology Considerations in Business Process Management (BPM)"

May 3rd from 10-11 Central

Register Now

Today, we define business process management as technology-enabled, continuous improvement.

In other words, what separates today’s business process management (BPM) initiatives from yesteryear’s business process re-engineering is largely advanced technology – leveraged through BPM software platforms such as Appian, Lombardi, webMethods, and others. This technology helps companies grow without adding staff.

Our next e-seminar gives you a closer look at the latest developments in BPM software, which comprises workflow, process modeling, a user portal and reporting dashboard. Widely deployed in manufacturing, healthcare, financial services and other industries, these software platforms do much, much more than diagram processes. Perhaps the biggest benefit: BPM software enables business managers to view, simulate and even automate some process improvements themselves. No more log jam in IT, waiting for resources.

Whether or not you are familiar with the latest BPM technology tools, there’s much to glean from this presentation. We will address key considerations in evaluating vendors and take a closer look at Appian’s BPM solution.

Local User Group Mtg II

Last Friday, we had our second local BPM user group meeting.  I think it went well.  We had a little over 20 people show up from lots of different companies.

At the meeting, we heard AG Edwards present on building a process centric organization.  Ron talked about creating a communication plan, building DTL (desktop learning), bringing in outside speakers, and other things they have done to get people ready for BPM. 

We also heard Enterprise Rent-A-Car present on how they are using BPM technology and share some of their lessons learned around BPM.  I think one of the most interesting ones was to plan to throw away some of your initial models because you will learn so much through iteration.  It reiterated one of the key points that I try to make with clients which is jump in.  Stop planning and start modeling and building. 

Our next meeting with be June 15th where we will hopefully have two local presenters give the presentations they have given at national conferences.  More to come on this. 

Why end-to-end process - Volvo example

I can't verify this example, but I have heard it used multiple times over the years and think it does a great job of making the point about end-to-end process.

At some point in the past, Volvo had apparently manufactured too many green cars.  They were sitting on the dealer lots and not selling.  The dealers decided to offer a special incentive around green painted cars. 

It worked and the cars started selling rapidly.  The manufacturing group that was doing planning noticed a spike in sales of green cars and immediately changes the paint orders so that more green cars are produced and sent to the dealers.  Hopefully, you see the problem.

We have all had some instance like this occur.  The problem is that processes have not been historically connected across functions, business units or even companies.  Only an end-to-end process which links planning to inventory to distribution to sales would see the problem.  This is one of the values of BPM and one of the challenges. 

Today, I can sub-optimize the whole to make my part better.  In the future, I have to do what's best for the company and the entire process. 

Building 2.0

One of our BPM projects right now is around facilities management and capital acquisition.  As I heard the project manager talk about it and introduce the concept of Building 2.0 the other day, I was really impressed with the interesting work the team is doing with the client. 

As a former architect, we talked about intelligent buildings in the 80s and 90s, but I haven't followed the practice much lately.  Our team is doing the obvious work around eliminating all the paperwork that surrounds buildings and facilities and streamlining the signoffs.  That is what BPM offers in a very traditional sense.

But, what I found interesting was the link of BPM with FM (Facilities Management) technologies from companies like Johnson Controls and ArchibusFM.  For example, one of the situations they described is where a device (e.g., a furnace) could monitor the condition of its key parts (e.g., a filter).  When it was almost time for the filter to be replaced, the process would initiate a purchase order and upon confirmation of the ship date from the supplier automatically schedule a maintenance visit.  Pretty interesting stuff. 

The project team is also creating automated dashboards to track all the facilities data (e.g., temperature of the room, use of the room) and create rules to help reduce energy usage across the buildings. 

Pricing Lifecyle

A key part of the 4Ps of marketing (price, promotion, product, and place) is pricing.  One of the complications with pricing is its lifecycle.  The biggest example that we all see around pricing is with airlines.  You can pay all kinds of different prices based on supply and demand, time or day that you buy the ticket, and other factors.

But, clothes, for example, follow a more traditional lifecycle where they initially are listed at the "list" price.  Over time, you see additional markdowns until either the floor price is hit or the clothes are sold off to the secondary market or sent to outlet stores.

Depending on the company, much of this pricing discounts are very rules based.  In some companies, it is more analysis based looking at what is selling and why.  This would be an easy process to automate.  The rules based discounting process could look for triggers (date, inventory level, etc.) to initiate a pricing discount and then launch a subprocess for updating stores and the system of record.  For analysis based processes, the process could link the analysis and the decision making to either automate the steps or potentially automate the decision making as the analysts make their decision making process more transparent.