This presentation is done by a big organization with round about 190,000 employees - the German Federal Armed Forces or just Bundeswehr. This presentation should have been given by Ms. Franke of Bundeswehr, but she unfortunately called in sick yesterday. Therefore, Ralph Michel, expert for BPM in defense industry at Software AG and who was a soldier himself for more than 10 years, is giving the presentation.
As most big armies, also Bundeswehr had to modernize like outsourcing certain services. For example, today many cars used by Bundeswehr are operated by an external service provider and leased to Bundeswehr. At the start of this modernization project, Bundeswehr used more than 1,200 different IT systems. They initiated the so called SASPF project, which is an acronym for "Integrated Standard-Application-Software-Product Family". This project focuses on modernizing all business processes of Bundeswehr like procurement and accounting, but not the military processes used during military missions (e.g. like calling in air support). At the core, Bundeswehr decided to use SAP as a provider for base functionality like procurement or accounting, even though it was estimated that only 70% of requirements were covered.
According to Ralph, one of the core challenges for Bundeswehr lies in the fact that it has a very strong organizational structure (no surprise as command and control requires that). Adding a strong process dimension to this organizational structure is not an easy task and might be a bigger challenge compared to an ordinary company.
Ralph himself worked as senior BPM consultant at Bundeswehr. According to him, it is a critical success factor that Bundeswehr established a core BPM competence center leading the BPM effort. Today, their BPM approach covers the following core processes:
- armed forces planning
- controlling
- accounting
- personnel
- organization
- armament/logistics
- infrastructure/environment
- individual training
- medical support/health care
Anyone, who worked on a BPM project can imagine that this is a very huge scope. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that this project already lasts more than 10 years. Ralph illustrates this pile of work on the organization core process. Quickly looking at the process landscape shows already 7 sub-processes and beneath that more than 30 sub-sub processes. He says that reorganizations happen every year, even if no big reorganizations are pushed by the defense ministry. The sub-processes of the core process organization are for example triggered, if a certain platoon is assigned to a new mother unit or army base. The processes detail how the SAP system must be reconfigured to correctly represent the new organizational structure. Interesting, Bundeswehr only uses 11 different icons in their process models. This helps reducing training efforts. Ralph focuses on this point, because he thinks that BPM power users sometimes tend to make the modeling method too complex. (Just a thought, but how many different event types are there in BPMN 2?)
It is an interesting presentation, because Ralph presents many lessons important for consultants working for a big organization. For example, he says that it is crucial in such a big project to train the decision takers at the customer first so that they are able to actually take decisions. In fact, he says it is better to delay the project some months to have enough time for such trainings.
At the end of the presentation, Ralph shows what Bundeswehr accomplished. Today, round about 40,000 people are using the new system and more than 50 projects were completed. They also gathered a lot of experience in managing such huge projects. For example, one key factor is managing master data correctly. This was not done consistently all over Bundeswehr and hindered the overall effort. And again, we had this point also in the previous session I covered, the expectations were too high and needed to be refined in the course of the project. Still, in my view a very impressing project, which we all can learn from.
Note: Check this overview post to get all links to the other live posts from ProcessWorld 2011 in Berlin
