Good business process design affects every part of the organization, whether it’s HR, finance, IT, supply chain, procurement or production. This video presents the challenges faced by organizations around the world when documenting and managing their business processes, and of course communicating to key stakeholders.
Speaking to many of our new customers, we identified eight common challenges they had faced when evaluating and using a tool for business process analysis.
Whether you are a business analyst, process modeling expert, business architect, doing an ERP or SAP implementation, or a business person charged with understanding and improving processes, here are the common challenges you might encounter:
1. Learning and Sustaining the use of complex BPA tools
2. Easily importing existing content, whether from other proprietary tools or MS Office
3. Centrally collating process documentation to ease collaboration
4. Communicating with key internal and external stakeholders across the organization
5. Providing Web ‘online’ access to process models and associated documents.
6. Easily generating valuable analysis and reporting
7. Adopting the BPMN 2.0 process modelling standard
1.Learning and Sustaining the use of complex BPA tools unicorn
Here at Orbus our credo is to make the tool as easy to use as possible. Why? If your analysts or architects cannot learn to use the tool quickly, then ultimately adoption will fail.
In 30% of our new customers we are replacing complex proprietary tools, developed in the 90s, which require 2-3 weeks of training and consultancy just to get started. This actually means the project is delayed, costs rise and momentum is lost.
iServer fully leverages the ease of use of Visio, as well as Word and Excel, to ensure your process teams are drawing good quality process models from day one.
We cannot emphasise enough that ease-of use is absolutely fundamental to the successful adoption of a tool!
iServer’s Visio modeling interface is just one aspect of the tool that makes it so quick to adopt, meaning minimal live training is required. There is also comprehensive iServer eLearning training available to ensure you and your teams are up and running in hours.
2. Easily importing existing content, whether from other tools or MS Office.
Many organizations have a host of important process models and associated documentation which they need to bring into a tool to leverage their past investment
Orbus’ iServer makes it very easy to directly import Visio and Office documentation, but also convert files from other proprietary tools that we are replacing.
So with iServer all you existing content from MS Office can be brought immediately into the repository, this may include, for example, catalogues and matrices in Excel which are then used to generate Visio diagrams. Teams can also bring in ‘dormant’ content from legacy tools such as Casewise, Aris, Mega, Nimbus, iGrafx and many more.
3. Centrally collating Process Documentation to ease collaboration.
Organizations have enormous amounts of process documentation, in divergent formats and tools, which is not easily accessible by different business units, teams and stakeholders. This problem is common to many organizations, undermining a collaborative approach to business process improvement.
iServer provides a powerful central repository for the whole organization. This repository enables effective collaboration between the modelling teams, business users and relevant stakeholders and it enforces consistently good practice across these teams and the wider organization.
And because iServer’s repository hosts both Office and Visio means you can relate a Visio Process diagram to the relevant process narratives in a Word document and full version control across both diagrams and documents is fully supports collaboration.
By the way, on this subject, do have a look at our free white paper: 10 Key Lessons for Business Process Modeling, which gives a look at the basics of this important activity and provides key lessons and techniques to ensure you are successful.
4. Communicating with key internal and external stakeholders across the organization
If a drawing, or process map, is to save a thousand words, it is essential it communicates salient information to stakeholders across the business. The iServer product has been designed to provide a common, easily accessible communication platform for the business to collaborate
For example, for Orbus customers who are implementing SAP, it is critical to align the processes within the business to core SAP functions. Those customers find that iServer enables precise communication between these process owners and the SAP configuration team
iServer lets you socialize information by publishing to a browser where key stakeholders to review and provide feedback. Similarly there are options to publish directly to SharePoint or quickly generate impressive presentations of your models in PowerPoint.
5.Providing Web ‘online’ access to process models and associated documents.
As organizations have centralized process models and associated documentation, the demand for access, by the business at large and key stakeholders, has grown.
iServer’s Portal product enables ‘anyone, anywhere’ to look directly into the live repository, across the web, and extract/ report on information as required.
So with live browser access to the, process owners and other stakeholders can easily navigate process content across the Office suite and review specific diagram and object properties for more the process detail. Furthermore, the web process modeler is simple way to sketch out diagrams and instantly provide them as feedback.
6. Easily generating valuable analysis and reporting
As organizations have become more focused on their process improvement and efficiency, there has been a demand for the dynamic generation of reports, analysis and dashboards.
iServer provides a powerful, comprehensive report generating capability, dashboards to illustrate performance criteria, as well as visual diagrammatic functionality to highlight specific business issues - an example of this would be heat maps to show areas of underperforming processes.
So iServer’s analysis and reporting tools enable planners to visualize the impact of changes to people, processes or technology, track different dependencies via relationship matrix and export the report they need to Excel. Furthermore, iServer Reporting Services module lets users generate and customise any reports on demand
7. Adopting the BPMN 2.0 process modeling standard.
Many organizations today are adopting BPMN 2.0, from the Object Management Group, which is the de facto standard for process modeling around the world.
iServer supports this demand by providing BPMN 2.0 templates, stencils and diagram validation to ensure the standard is applied easily and consistently across the whole organization.
Incidentally - if you’d like some practical guidance on this standard, we have a free reference guide to BPMN 2.0 available for you to download today, and at the same time make sure you look through our full range of over 100 free white papers.
Summary
So I hope this video of the ‘eight challenges’ has given you an insight into some of the issues confronting organizations as they seek to improve, develop and communicate process across the enterprise.
If you’d like to find out how iServer can help you meet the issues you face in your own organization, why not book a demo with one of our consultants today.
Business Process Analysis BPMN Video