Nick Deacon of Nokia Siemens Networks (they do the mobile networks for 65M users, not the phones) gave a presentation on empowering the customer through process improvement and BPM. With the recent acquisition of Motorola networks, they have almost 80,000 employees in 150 countries, with over half of their employees in service areas. Telecom is pretty volatile these days, with telecom, IT and media eco-systems mixing to create a data traffic explosion. This means that the networks needs to be both efficient and resilient while delivering the desired customer experience, so that we can all watch YouTube on our smartphones.
It used to be that you could just make your customer work the way that you needed them to work within your predefined efficient processes; now, however, the customers need more control over the services that they consume. NSN looks as their customer interaction points – much like what we heard from Bill Band this morning on analyzing the customer journey – and focus on improving those interaction points that are the most critical to improving the customer perception.
They are a big SAP customer, but find that they use Appian BPM to fill the gaps that SAP just doesn’t do without major customization, and to bridge between different systems. They’ve implemented BPM in five major business areas with more than 22,000 users. By reusing some components but adapting to each particular business area, they’re able to roll out new systems in a matter of months. They are pushing into social capabilities to facilitate faster decision-making, and mobile platforms to better support remote users.
As Deacon said in his summary, BPM enables them to react quickly to meet business needs and to respond effectively to better serve their customers.