The third and the forth stop of the Process Intelligence roadshow is over and I want to give you an update how it has gone so far. The third stop took place in the Volvo Museum in Gothenburg. Volvo consists of two independent companies. There is Volvo Cars which you probably know because of their nice autos. The bigger company, however, is Volvo Group producing trucks, buses, construction equipment, aero equipment, financial services, and Volvo Penta focusing on systems for marine and industrial application. The Volvo Group has a headcount of around 100,000 production facilities in 19 countries, and sales operations in some 180 countries. They won the Business Process Excellence Award in 2009 for successfully using ARIS for the effective implementation of SAP roll-out projects worldwide. They used the Process-Driven SAP method to create a uniform platform for efficient teamwork. The ARIS repository is tying everything together.
In the first part of the Volvo live demo you saw ARIS Business Publisher as a communication platform. Processes are documented on 5 levels. The process landscape is the starting point, then come the main processes, the partial processes (e.g. order-to-cash), followed by the subprocesses using EPC to describe the series of activities. In the last level, process activities are mapped with SAP transactions. The processes were synched with Solution Manger for execution.
Now it's about time to monitor how the processes are actually running. The target system is Volvos financial SAP platform. ARIS Process Performance Manger (PPM) is used to extract, visualize, analyze and optimize the operational processes. As a management tool, Volvo is using a dashboard to measure key performance indicators (KPIs). The KPIs are coming directly from the financial systems. Typical KPIs for an order-to-cash process are number of invoices, dunning ratio, dunning effect ratio, timespan posting-payment, overdue ratio, days overdue, and costs of total overdue. From the dashboard they jump directly to ARIS PPM to see the processes which cause problems - from a red traffic light to the root cause analysis in one second. In the picture you see the dunning process as it was executed. You see see a number of changes. This might be the reason why the process is not meeting its KPIs.
In this picture you see the number of open invoices in the green bar. The blue bar stands for the costs of the overdue. It's easy to see that in the right section very few overdues are causing the highest damage. Now it is easy to see which overdues you need to focus on. By clicking on the blue bar you can directly open the processes which are causing the damage.
One final best practice from Volvo: If you want to implement Process Intelligence successfully in your organization you need to bring business and IT people to one table to answer these questions: What do we want to measure? How do we measure it?
I really liked the presentation of Volvo and it very much impressed me how they use Process Intelligence to improve their day-by-day business. I guess they will have good chance to win the next Business Process Excellence Award, this time in the Process Intelligence category. I will keep my fingers crossed. The tour now moves on to Oslo, Helsinki, and Copenhagen. At all stops you will get the chance to see the Volvo presentation live.
- Nov. 2, Finland - Espoo
- Nov. 4, Norway - Oslo
- Nov. 9, Denmark - Copenhagen
- Nov. 25, Italy - Milano
We will also have a MashCamp at every stop, the free MashZone workshop. We install the software together with you on your laptop and create your first mashup. At the stop in Stockholm we stayed one hour longer and created a nice Enterprise Architecture mashup based on an ARIS IT Architect export from an attendee!
If you want to participate register here: www.pi-roadshow.com. On our Process Intelligence blog you also find a review of the roadshow stops in Brussels and Amsterdam.
Here are some impressions from the events in Gothenburg and Stockholm: