But at the start of the BPM effort, Phillips, like so many before him, had to confront the seemingly ubiquitous and frustrating disconnect between the business and IT. “IT wasn’t siloed, but it was parallel,” he says. “We didn’t have a tight coupling between business and IT.” It wasn’t a simple vocabulary problem: the business just had stopped communicating well with IT.

To begin fixing the disconnect, Phillips “spent a lot of time telling the story of what challenges we faced and, more importantly, what opportunities we had. We really got to where we had shared forums with business leaders, process leaders and IT leaders. Along the way, we learned about the talent of the IT organization that we could capitalize on.

“We established an organization called continuous improvement,” Phillips says. “We put one of our best business leaders in charge of that, one I knew had organizational credibility and respect and had demonstrated an ability to collaborate with IT.” This group established regular meetings to discuss governance and key projects.

“Having the right person in the right place…it’s amazing how things can progress from there,” he says.

Phillips signed a deal with Lombardi Software, choosing its TeamWorks platform for the BPM revamp. Ninety days later, his team started rolling out process changes.

After Strategy, Tactics
Remember: Phillips believes that thinking big is a key to successful BPM. Maritz starts with a macro process, such as selling, then tackles subphases, such as quick turnarounds on projects, contract building and dealing with outside suppliers. Phillips and his team do major releases every quarter, minor releases every month.

A major release might address an entire subphase, “say, how we link in the participant management function,” Phillips says. Martitz’s participant management staffers book the air and hotel travel, handle questions from the people attending the trip and so on. “A minor release might deal with a portion of our contract process or pricing process,” he says.

The net for the company? “We certainly get faster, but more importantly, we get better,” he says. “We get repeatability. It’s the integrity of our delivery process.”

“We’re also identifying softer benefits,” Phillips says. “It used to be harder to bring in employees to use our new systems. Now it’s much more intuitive, and people have crisper access to the right information at the right time to do their jobs.

The process revamp has helped Maritz staffers not only find the right information faster, but also, spend more time on activities that add value for clients, Phillips says. For example, Maritz historically has used numerous forms throughout its travel program planning operation. “Our people needed to find the right forms, retype information into these forms, distribute these forms [via e-mail], then ensure that form updates made their way to all of the right people [internally, external partners, clients],” he says. Now the company prepopulates those forms. “We also serve up those forms to people at the right time to ensure process integrity and timely information distribution,” he adds. “In addition to delivering better service, our people are freed up to focus on incremental value delivery,” such as, he says, creative thinking, information analysis and supplier negotiations.