Nick Deacon, Global Head of BPM for consulting and systems integration within Nokia Siemens Networks, a global network communications services firm. The consulting and systems integration group, with a staff of 3,500-4000 and annual sales of 400M Euro, has the usual problems of managing a workforce of service providers, and were looking for a BPM solution — easy to use, relatively low cost and easy to customize — to help them better manage what he referred to as the Mean Time Between Surprises. They were looking to quickly implement their core processes of sales, service execution, and resource and competence management, before global IT noticed what they were doing and turned it into a mega-project.
Since the project started in February (yes, this February), they have implemented their first module (service delivery process) and rolled it out to 400 users across all of their global regions, including portals and dashboards for analyzing and managing the business. At the same time, they were working on the resource and competence management process module, which is about to start into testing, and the sales and technical support processes will be ready for deployment in November. Product and portfolio management will follow in December, and offshore delivery management in February. Basically, that means that they will have deployed BPM across all of their major business processes within 12 months.
Through reduced data entry, increase sharing of information and increased reuse of project assets, they expect productivity savings of 12-16M Euro per year, which (I hope 🙂 ) provide an ROI of much less than a year.
There’s now interest from other areas within NSN, and their projects are becoming a sort of proof of concept for BPMS across the much larger organization, not just within the consulting and systems integration group.
Deacon had nothing but good things to say about Appian in terms of both the product and how their professional services has worked with NSN to deliver the right business functionality on a tight schedule across a global enterprise. He sees them as being aligned with NSN’s vision and strategy for BPM, and have been a true partner on their implementation. They looked at larger BPM vendors, but found their solutions too rigid and too expensive.