The Business Process That Wouldn’t Die

Back when he was still working in IT, Ray Wang suffered one of those classic “How did they let that happen?” moments. It’s no wonder he went into analysis (as a principal analyst with Forrester Research, of course…what did you think we meant?)

I was working at a company that was set to roll out a $15 million ERP implementation as part of a multichannel order management project. Our CIO was fired two weeks before the project was supposed go live. The new CIO had us come in to review architecture. His current-state processes were mapped to future-state systems. Without going into details, it looked like the team had done a detailed mapping. We’d cut off legacy systems at the same time go-live occurred. Teams were nonstop testing for weeks, making sure that any current functionality wasn’t lost.

On the day we went live, we flicked on the switch and everything was humming along. We breathed a sigh of relief as orders kept coming in with no issues. Fulfillment looked fine.

But sometime around midday, we discovered that the staff couldn’t keep up with the orders, and we couldn’t figure out why. In the background we heard that the printers were running out of paper, which seemed like a normal issue. Otherwise, all the systems were chugging along. The website was getting good hits and orders seemed to be coming in OK. The goal of the rollout was to move most of the orders to customer self-service, and so far it seemed that the self-service Web orders were coming into the system with no problems.

However, we found out later that the system was automatically taking the data and pumping out a fax, which then printed out via the company’s printers for someone on the team to reenter the data into the system! The process consultants replicated existing business processes without optimizing them and so the company ended up having to hire 20 more order entry clerks to keep up with the 400 percent increase in volume of faxes!

Next: Shaken, Not Stirred…

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