Arun Mathews of Motorola, a Savvion customer, presented on the experiences of implementing BPM at Motorola. He started out with a list of reasons why they started with BPM, ranging from Six Sigma projects driving the need for new policies and procedures, through metrics and measurement needs. They started by mapping the as-is business processes, analyzing the processes, designing the to-be processes, and implementing in Savvion: pretty standard stuff.
Then, they start on process monitoring and continuous process improvement; as a big Six Sigma shop, continuous improvement and innovation are part of their corporate culture and their a process-oriented company, which gives them a huge advantage over many other large companies. They also have a focussed methodology for doing all of this, which appears to be a key differentiator for them over other organizations implementing (or attempting to implement) BPM.
They have a number of successful BPM projects that they’ve implemented, including core supply chain processes. Although he couldn’t share many of the numbers with us, since it’s proprietary information, he did discuss the metrics that they used as direct input into process improvement, such as timeliness and reworks, both of which impact customer satisfaction.
What did they learn from all this? First of all, this is a major paradigm shift that needs some amount of change management at all levels, but the business loves it once they start to see the benefits. Training in BPM methodology is key to this acceptance. Incorporate BPM into a long-term architecture plan, but start small on implementation projects with high ROI and/or high visibility.
Motorola has obviously made a big commitment to BPM, and are reaping the benefits of it: they’ve redefined their process automation and management to use a collaborative methodology with the business taking on much more ownership, which in turn reduces project timelines and costs. Motorola IT is recognized as an industry leader, and in 2005, their CIO recognized BPM as one of the top reasons for their innovation. The bottom line, however, is that it’s not enough to just buy a BPMS and start implementing: you have to have a process view on things.