BPM Success: How a Travel Giant Turned Its Ship Around
Declining sales. Cost pressure. Customers who wanted change, fast. Maritz Travel's COO tells how a group travel giant facing all of these pressures revamped its business processes, and how business and IT came together to make the effort pay off.
“BPM also drives down end user workarounds,” he says, noting that part of his initial pitch to other business leaders on the need for the BPM effort was that the company had a lot of useful data hiding in spreadsheets and e-mail because people were working around existing enterprise processes. “It was a real issue for us.”
A final deployment strategy that Phillips recommends is to establish what he calls “distributed ownership teams” for a BPM revamp. That means having business people reporting up from the trenches, helping shape what needs to happen in those major and minor releases and then helping communicate the benefits of the proposed changes for customers back to the work groups.
This arrangement can be thought of as a change management best practice, eliminating some of the “us vs. them” tension endemic to any transformation, large or small. “We all know people in the trenches know the most about what’s working, where the opportunities are,” he says. “They’ve already established credibility with their peers, as opposed to having people pointing to a central group and saying, ‘Hey, they don’t understand us; they don’t understand our problems.’”
If you’re wondering why Maritz Travel chose Lombardi Software’s TeamWorks platform for its BPM revamp, rest assured it wasn’t the technology. According to Maritz COO Rich Phillips, it was because Lombardi showed a firm grasp of the business strategy issues.
The bad news for IT execs is that being a software selection pro won’t help you much with your BPM projects. A BPM effort, as Motorola CIO Patty Morrison says, is not about tools, it’s about process. You can pick the most technically sound BPM tool in the world but what really makes BPM go, according to Morrison, is a combined effort by IT and business to examine process, then reshape process and culture.
Phillips agrees, saying, “It’s important to pick a provider that really understands process and transformation and has an aligned road map.
“I know the [software] giants will eventually figure this out, but this requires a different way of thinking,” he adds. “The Phase 1 implementation is really irrelevant. It’s what you learn from Phase 1 to make Phase 2 and Phase 3 better.”
In addition to Lombardi, vendors like Savvion and Pegasystems are helping companies wrap key business processes in software outside of the core ERP suite, says Forrester Research’s Sharyn Leaver.
Some IT execs may wonder why they should trust a smaller vendor when addressing their company’s most critical processes but the reality, Leaver says, is that SAP and Oracle may be a couple of years away from being able to help you with BPM.
SAP’s new hosted ERP suite for mid-market customers, Business ByDesign, has a business process engine, she notes, but that’s a brand-new product. Consequently, you’re not going to get feedback from peers on how it’s working so far. (In the end, Oracle and/or SAP may choose to acquire one of the BPM expert companies in order to boost its prowess in that arena, she says.)
There’s a comforting reality right now for IT departments charged with wrapping key business process using a BPM platform, Leaver notes: Virtualization can help.
Virtualization, already high on the list of most companies’ technology priorities, lets IT simplify and speed up development and testing of the BPM releases, safely.
