Barbara Fackelman and Regina DeGennaro of Pershing (a BNY Mellon subsidiary providing outsourced financial transaction services) presented at Gartner BPM 2013 about their BPM initiative, as it grew from reengineering a broken process related to federal reserve exchanges — saving them $1M/year — to a BPM center of excellence (COE). As I often recommend for growing a COE, they built their COE as an offshoot of their initial project by building a reusable BPM framework along the way, then communicated that out to the rest of the organization to undercover other potential spots for process improvement.
They started to identify sub-processes and functions that are reusable across different processes, such as document rendezvous, which impacted document scanning and handling processes as well as the downstream transaction processing. With that in their portfolio, they were able to implement additional BPM projects with significant savings, making the BPM COE a very popular service inside Pershing.
Their BPM COE reports up to the executive committee, and gets input from a number of other sources internally:
- Architecture review board
- Technology prioritization committee
- Dedicated programming groups and QA
- Process owners
- Quality management office
- BPM solutions team
They have a number of key roles in the BPM COE:
- Executive sponsor
- Process owner
- Process architect
- Product owner
- Governors
- Development leads
- Quality assurance
- Product manager
- Business analyst
- Process librarian
- Metrics master (BI architect)
With all of this in place, they have a mature COE that supports process optimization and innovation, and reviews new technologies to support the enhanced vision. Interestingly, they treat their BPM COE like any other process project: having defined and implemented it, they are constantly monitoring what/how their COE is doing, and continuously optimizing it. As an outsourcing firm, their main focus is on maximizing straight-through processes, and they can measure the performance of the COE since STP is a specific mission of the COE. As they have found, nothing succeeds like success: their STP process improvements to date have led to more collaboration and projects in other areas of their organization.
They’re using a lot of homegrown stuff, plus IBM BPM and Pega; like most big financial services organizations, they are piecing together a lot of this themselves to make it work best for them.