Some time ago, Sandy Kemsley posted an interesting blog entitled "Do BPM vendors eat their own dog food?" which discussed whether BPM vendors use their own products, and if so, to what extent. This intrigued me, so I decided to find out for myself how much we folks at IDS Scheer use our own products for process intelligence purposes.
ARIS Process Performance Manager (ARIS PPM) is a tool that enables enterprises to monitor and analyze the performance and structure of their business processes, thereby making continuous optimization of internal and external workflows possible. We use our products in the following application scenarios.
Scenario 1: Academy
The first place ARIS PPM was deployed was the IDS Scheer Academy, where it's used to capture feedback from course attendees. The process comprises course registration, hotel accommodations, course attendance, and the trip home with the course materials. Attendees use a feedback form on the company intranet to rate the course, with the form treated as a process in ARIS PPM. The evaluation is made available to the IDS Scheer Academy team. In addition, every trainer receives a report containing details of their rating by course attendees. The entire process is automated, which means faster processing, transparent data, shorter response times, and corresponding staff resource savings.
Scenario 2: Incident management
All internal and external queries and complaints are supported by the ARIS PPM and ARIS PEM systems, enabling event-based process monitoring in real time. Features include proactive, real-time reporting of critical calls and potential escalation, measurement of achieved objectives, and automatic detection of unusual behavior patterns. The dashboard presents information in condensed form for easy visualization, making it possible to see how quickly tickets (customer queries) have been responded to. The key benefits are ongoing quality control and optimized resource management. "The combination of real-time monitoring of the ticket process and e-mail notification allows us to take fast corrective action to prevent SLA violations", says Rüdiger Bernges, head of ARIS Product Services.
Scenario 3: SLA (service level agreement) reporting
Over 30 standard SLA reports for application and operations services have been created, covering the number of tickets, tickets per SAP module, effort per ticket, and other aspects, such as response times. The reports are sent by the service manager to the managed services customer, who benefits from a timely overview of the services provided.
Scenario 4: Sales management
Opportunity management information that was previously hard to access is now available at the push of a button. Sales managers can see what opportunities exist and when they were first identified. In addition, they can view the forecast for the next two months.
Scenario 5: Order processing
ARIS PPM provides a daily report on orders received over the past 24 hours, which is used to produce the preliminary sales figures presented to the executive board at the end of each month. It's also used to notify the investor relations department of new customers, allowing inclusion in quarterly reports. Revenues and sales KPIs can be analyzed by country, product, solution, and channel. Benefits include the elimination of delays in revenue reporting, improved order processing quality, and a more efficient response to customer queries.
Scenario 6: Recruiting
The aim here is to optimize the application process to ensure that IDS Scheer can hire strong candidates even faster. By monitoring e-recruiting activities, we can respond faster to applications that interest us. A professional, fast recruiting process enables us to stand out from the competition by proactively reacting to that vital first contact with our organization. It also boosts our image in the recruitment market. I was genuinely surprised to see the many different ways that PPM is being used. The bottom line is that if a product offers real value, it will quickly gain acceptance and spread. Ultimately, users have the best ideas about how to deploy new technologies.
