Uh, this one is challenging, because it is given in German, but I need to write here in English... The talk is presented by Mr. Zacharias of LandesBank Berlin, a local bank with 1.9 million customers in Berlin region. According to Mr. Zacharias, they had their financial crisis already around the year 2000 so that they were out of money to gamble in the recent financial crisis and are doing fine today :-)
In 2000, the bank was in deep trouble. Policies required by public regulation were not up-to-date and often only existed as outdated paper copies. They had to exchange a number of 10.5 million sheets of paper in order to update the regulations continuously. To overcome this situation, they started with BPM and ARIS, which also enabled them to approach other topics like strategic quality management, risk management and compliance management. Replacing the paper copies of their regulations saves them 3 million each year.
In a first step, they removed everything from those regulations, which was not binding like tips and tricks contained. Also, they found that texts are not a good way to convey regulations, but that instead models should be used. They ended up with about 1,500 models in ARIS.
They did not solely rely on ARIS. For example, additional descriptions were put on a document management system and linked from the ARIS repository. At the beginning they also did a quite extensive documentation leading to low user acceptance. They solved that by creating something Mr. Zacharias calls ARIS light, even though he notes they still have to pay the full ARIS license fees :-) ARIS light is their modelling convention removing everything not really necessary. In the end, they end up with the following model types:
- value-added chain
- process selection matrix
- EPC, but only containing main steps, but no further details
Besides those obvious method reductions, they also used some additional tricks to come up with lean process documentation. Texts linked to ARIS models were expected to be in a very short expressive language like reports found in the yellow press. Mr. Zacharias said this worked out fine, but they are still struggling with some departments used to poetry like legal services :-)
Also, if people complained about complex models in ARIS, they pointed out that the models only represented reality. They asked them to fix reality, which would also lead to simplified models in ARIS.
In EPC models, they removed most events, which contained no additional information besides that the preceeding function was done. EPC rules were replaced with new icons containing the texts "OR" and "AND" instead of mathematical symbols.
Each week, the latest process database is published in their intranet. People asked to get a summary of what changed. They now use graphical objects they add to the diagrams to highlight those parts, which changed during the update.
They taught ARIS and the usage of their document management system to key stakeholders, which worked as mediators to end users. They also provided web based trainings.
It seems, they also used many additional advanced techniques to make their BPM effort efficient. For example, weekly publishing is automated, semantic checks were added to ARIS to ensure modelling guidelines, automated release cycle management of new or changed models, individual search and retrieval functionality for own internal revision team. Also, employees get notified on changes if they are affected by the change. Interestingly, they reuse all objects in ARIS, but not EPC function and events. So a document object or an object representing an IT system can only be created ones. Again, they use semantic checks to ensure this.
The availability of their process documentation allowed them to roll out new services faster. For example, they started providing processing services to other banks. They needed certification like ISO 9001:2008 for those services, but which was no problem due to their previous invest in business process management.
Their BPM program was running since 2000/2001. Since then, they initiated several other internal projects, for example accounting based on IAS/IFRS. Again, they used their process models to get started. For example, they identified 700 processes probably affected by this change. Similar projects were MaRisk implementation and a migration of the central operating system used for account processing.
Mr. Zacharias acknowledged that one main issue of process management is keeping the process documentation up-to-date. They ensure this by having 440 ARIS content managers. In 2009, 2,400 processes were updated. They evaluated that they cover 95% of all distribution processes and 75% of all operating processes. Each month, they notice 36,000 accesses to the process information published on their Intranet.
Critical success factors are top management support, available resources, readiness for change, but also patience that things take time. Communication played also an important role like involving stakeholders while creating ARIS light or coaching new employees.
Again, a very informative talk with many great lessons learnt!
