We have published the 5th release of our Business Flows. With 11 Domains, 170 End-to-End Scenarios and 475 BPMN processes and many other features such as SAP capabilities and scope items Business Flows now has matured to a comprehensive Business Transformation Framework.
Read MoreInsights - Business Transformation Day 2022 - Schloss Krickenbeck
Gülsüm Ucuran
On November 10, 2022, the Business Transformation Day with top Key Note speakers, insightful customer presentations, as well as interesting short presentations by selected partners (SAP SE, Software AG, msg services GmbH) took place in the beautiful premises of Schloss Krickenbeck.
This year, Mr. Russell Gomersall, one of the managing partners of bpExperts, moderated the Business Transformation Day. After a short welcome to the participants, he presented the highlights of the last 10 years of bpExperts annual events. Getting customers to network and talk together has a long tradition at bpExperts. Openly discussing each other’s business transformation journey, which methodologies and tools were applied, and most of all, how the participants have ‘managed change’ within their organization in order to sustain the ‘process driven way’. For many participants also a comfortable feeling, that they are not alone with their day-to-day struggles. Over the years many Use Cases have been the same. But the challenges and pressure that today’s business transformation initiatives are confronted with are higher than ever. The complexity of new operating models, expectations towards digitalization, the complexity of hybrid application landscapes, the growing relevance of compliance, all under time and budget constraints have a great impact on all aspects of the business transformation initiatives. The Key Notes clearly show how over the years the participants have grown to an astonishing maturity with these challenges.
Key Notes
During the morning session, the following practical presentations and insights were contributed by
Mr. Caspar Jans, (Software AG)
“How does an Enterprise Management System help you steer through these challenging times?”Mrs. Corinna Frank, (PHOENIX CONTACT GmbH & Co. KG),
“ARIS in a hybrid setup. The best of both worlds?”Mr. Thomas Göbel, (Evonik Superabsorber GmbH)
“Carve-Out readiness based on an End-To-End Process house.”Mr. Michael Becker, Vaillant GmbH
“Enterprise Process Model Development within a Digital Transformation Program.”
Round Table
After the lunch break we organized a Knights of the Round Table get-together: In Schloss Krickenbeck’s infamous ‘Rittersaal’ (see pictures below), we offered multitude roundtable topics, and facilitated the subsequent discussions around the Key Notes, and additional presentations from our partners Software AG, SAP SE and msg services GmbH.
The Knights of the Round Table covered the following topics :
Markus Wolf, Stefan Hauenschild, bpExperts GmbH
Dr. Dorothee Wenzler, Dr. Jochen König, bpExperts GmbH
Business Transformation Governance: From change control to transformation enablement.
Dr. Ikemefuna Allen, Dr. Russell Gomersall, Gabriela Warner, bpExperts GmbH
Mind the gap! How Operating Models bridge the gap between processes design and business operations.
Christian Reiter, msg services gmbh
Green-, Brown-, Bluefield? msgFIT helps you to make the right decision!
Caspar Jans, Software AG
Sinje Seidler, SAP SE
SAP Cloud ALM : Shape your future ALM Strategy!
Many thanks therefore to all guest which made this event special by sharing their experience and thoughts and last but not least a special thanks to our great customers and partners.
Hope to meet you soon again!
After such a great event and exclusive presentations, there was no shortage of celebrating our 10th anniversary of bpExperts. Here is a small excerpt but do not worry the rest of the photos are well sealed ;)
Process-driven Business Transformation: Achieving process, system, data, and people readiness with one methodology
A holistic readiness for transformation requires structures weaving together the areas for readiness of processes, systems, data, and people. Tying it all together into one methodology allows for project specific customization of the approach by program and project management while ensuring consistency and transparency.
The readiness idea and process focus
Processes are at the center of every business transformation. They facilitate well-structured discussions and decision making, as well as training and communication. The aim is to link the company strategy, operating models, and targets of the transformation to the to-be design, as well as required system support, and data. The intended future state and necessary adjustments are made easy to understand for various stakeholders.
Getting people to understand processes, systems and data in their daily context creates business readiness. That is what we do as Business Integrator.
Our methodology ensures senior stakeholder buy-in and process understanding early in the transformation by covering the business drivers and operating models of their business and linking those to harmonized standard core processes.
The readiness idea and system focus
Having established clear strategic targets broken down per process area allows process owners and experts to determine requirements and changes both on business, as well as system perspectives. Requirements can be translated directly into solution design in context with the envisioned future state of business operations.
Offering guidance along standard processes, best practice, and system expertise protects the integrity of the solution design. The amount of system customization can be limited to where it is required to achieve the targeted strategic benefits.
Early contributions and decision-making responsibilities of process owners and experts lead to in-depth understanding of targets and design, to intensive knowledge build-up within the customer organization and fosters later acceptance of changes.
The readiness idea and data focus
Data, and especially master data represent the link between the various business cases and the applicable business processes, and consequently processing within the solution design in a highly automated and digitalized world. It is hence pivotal to establish already throughout the design and transition a widely shared understanding of how data steers processes and functionality.
The readiness idea and people focus
Discussing and elaborating on business processes naturally leads to identification of impacted organizational areas, and to an early assessment of change impacts on the daily operations and on core business KPIs. It also allows for a clear location of changes, thus providing a sound basis for planning and preparation of the actual implementation of adjustments. Furthermore, the structured and interlinked documentation of change impacts enables identification of essential business and design decisions.
Over time objectives might change and adjustments to the design must be made for several reasons on all levels. We enable the orchestration of changes by efficiently documenting all transformation aspects, including business and design decisions in an interlinked and comprehensive manner.
We believe in these re-enforcing factors of our process-driven business transformation methodology.
Example – business-relevant testing
When using our process-driven business transformation methodology, test cases and test scenarios can be derived directly from the respective flows or underlying operating models, from the related business cases and further connected to the defined End-to-End processes. This already contributes to identifying the relevancy of test cases in combination with pertinent data for the users’ future daily lives. It allows testers, like business key users, to generate valuable insights both for training preparation, but also as feedback for small improvement ideas which can boost acceptance of the solution amongst affected user groups. The reporting on test status can be tailored to the needs of various stakeholder groups. The respective process owners can receive a status for their area of responsibility, like Pl2P, O2C or A2R. Business managers can be provided with details on testing progress for their relevant operating models and core business activities. Reported errors from testing, as well as improvement ideas can be reported directly to the relevant stakeholders. This makes testing results and related information more tangible.
Key messages:
The fully interconnected process-driven business transformation methodology improves understanding of relevancy of the planned transformation on individual level of all stakeholders. As a result, decision making can be accelerated and the quality of decisions can be increased, while fostering an identification with and acceptance of the transformation.
It is not sufficient to adress all those aspects individually; you need to tackle them in an orchestrated approach across all stakeholders and throughout the whole transition period
Your business transformation vision requires a managed and transparent break-down, and a translation to manifest in people, processes, systems, and data
The key for agility and sustainability of your transformation is the capability to coherently reciprocate along the path of intention, decision, and implementation
Call for Action
A special occasion to learn more is our Business Transformation Day on the 10th Nov. 2022. Alternatively request a free demo anytime.
Business Flows meets SAP's One Process Acceleration Layer
After SAP acquired Signavio and announced the One Process Acceleration Layer for SAP solutions and the corresponding beta program, we were thrilled about the opportunities this may have in store for us.
The One Process Acceleration Layer is a practice for better and faster transformations and represents the collective knowledge from thousands of transformation projects SAP delivered over time. This knowledge is conveyed to organizations in the form of value accelerators such as reference business and solution architectures, solution best-practices, business metrics, and thought leadership papers.
At bpExperts our core competence is to support companies in building a process repository including all relevant artifacts and establishing a process driven approach including methodology, required roles, and governance to support the business transformation life cycle.
On its end, SAP’s One Process Acceleration Layer practice will also be driving more organizations to adopt a process driven transformation approach delivering value accelerators which can be explored and consumed centrally, via the SAP Signavio Process Explorer.
From a bpExperts perspective we were anxious about how our Business Flows fits into the equation and can work in conjunction with SAP’s One Process Acceleration Layer practices. Will Business Flows become obsolete with the provision of SAP’s reference content, will it be perceived as a competition or is there a clear added value to be addressed in using both?
After deeply diving into the content and meta-model, we are happy to announce that it is the latter:
We believe Business Flows adds considerable value to customers on their Business Transformation journey and especially in combination with SAP’s content.
Business Flows content has been mapped to One Process Acceleration Layer best-practices so that companies exploring both can find consistency, synergies and added value from a combined use.
Fig. 1 shows how we map Business Flows objects to SAP’s content. Let me explain which key elements our framework provides and how they link:
Strategy Framework and Capabilities
Our current strategic framework is based on the idea that companies should identify their core objectives based on SCOR performance metrics (Business Drivers) and link these to the relevant Business Capabilities, as well as their scoped E2E scenarios. Our framework supports this exercise because we have already mapped the Business Drivers to our E2E scenarios and a set of Business Capabilities.
SAP’s content that is now in beta offers insights into the various solution capabilities. We have therefore re-mapped SAP’s Business Capabilities to our Business Drivers and where possible directly to the E2E scenarios. This allows the users to identify which SAP capabilities and solutions best help them achieve their goals and create a high-level solution architecture. With the January 2023 release, SAP will also be delivering its own business drivers, connected to business capabilities, including metrics and best practice content to deliver top to bottom, strategy to execution.
E2E process reference architecture and content
Business Flows offers a comprehensive set of E2E scenarios based on a process library. The scope of the processes covers the typical use cases within industrial companies. All scenarios are organized according to their E2E - Domain (i.e., Order-to-Cash, Procure-to-Pay) as well as a scenario cluster which is a collection of scenarios of a specific topic (i.e., consignment, replenishment etc.). Each scenario consists of a value chain of business processes and interfaces to other scenarios. The whole content is consistent and can be used to scope and rapidly set up a company specific repository. The granularity of our business processes is aligned with SAP's libraries, therefore they fit very well to the value chains provided by SAP's industry content. The industry content is organized into collections such as 'AMG' for Automotive Manufacturing or 'OTC' for the Chemicals Order-to-Cash scenarios. We have created and included a scenario cluster for each of these groups and within the cluster we list each scenario with a link to the original content (see Fig. 2). This allows users to discover the industry specific content and include it in their scope, if suitable. Of course, taking an SAP scenario into scope requires transferring the relevant content into the customer repository and re-establishing the process repository’s consistency. Rebuilding a consistent Business Process library is anyhow a necessary task after scoping and a standard step within our approach.
SAP Best Practices
As part of the content provided by the One Process Acceleration Layer, the scope of the solution (e.g., SAP S/4HANA) can be defined with so-called Best Practices (Scope Items). We believe that these Best Practices as defined by SAP have a great value during the process design phase. They help identify Best Practices which can be included into the solution. In Business Flows we have mapped the Best Practices to our repository. The nature of Best Practices, especially the variance on granularity, resulted in a mapping on various levels but mainly on Process Group or E2E scenario level.
Similar to the approach mentioned above, we only transfer the selected Best Practices into the customer repository and ensure a consistent repository. This consistency is especially important when the content is synchronized to the Solution Manager for the sake of solution documentation, test management or using focused build.
Process Driven SAP Cookbook
Walking the talk of SAP Activate and leveraging the content of SAP’s reference content in a Business Transformation initiative does not only require building up a process repository with the artifacts mentioned above. To ensure the 'process driven' approach, it requires coordinating many activities to refine and use the content in a consistent manner across the whole lifecycle.
To guide customers through this process we have created a Process Driven SAP “Cookbook”. In itself, this is a model in SAP Signavio (Fig. 3) which contains all work packages related to the SAP Activate Phase and Stream. They include descriptions of the key activities, involved roles, outcomes and especially guidance on which artifacts of the process repository are used or created.
Conclusion
Our current investigation is based on the beta version, and we know that the general availability for SAP Signavio Process Explorer and the related One Process Acceleration Layer practices is actually planned for January 2023 with more content and value accelerators such as performance-driven scenarios being delivered. Nevertheless, even in its current beta state, the SAP’s approach with One Process Acceleration layer providing reference and best-practices content is a great step forward in fostering a process-driven transformation approach and it really lives up to its claim to ‘accelerate’ a business transformation. We also believe that our offering in Business Flows - a comprehensive business transformation framework with process repository and transformation cookbook – adds further value to it.
Call for Action
Please reach out if you want to have a demo on Business Flows in combination with SAP Signavio.
For questions regarding the SAP’s One Process Acceleration Layer visit the SAP Signavio website (https://www.signavio.com/one-process-acceleration-layer/).
Account-to-Report Maturity Assessment
Account-to-Report Maturity Assessment - A process oriented approach for evaluating the performance of your Finance & Accounting operations
Maturity assessment offers a pragmatic approach to evaluate the performance of an organization because it – unlike performance indicators alone – gives an insight to areas of improvement and helps setting realistic goals by decomposing the maturity into different dimensions and applying a ‘stages of excellence’ approach helping companies to orient and benchmark it’s performance.
Account-to-Report maturity is assessed considering different dimensions of the organization and provides a well-rounded view on whether Finance & Accounting departments “are doing things right” or whether specific areas may need improvement.
The six maturity dimensions are:
Process Efficiency
Systems standardization and integration
Strategic Objectives and KPIs
Data quality and availability
Process performance and compliance transparency
Staff empowerment
Along these six dimensions, data is collected in a maturity survey structured along 10 Account-to-Report processes areas of our Business Flows reference model. The survey results provide a diagnosis of the “as is” situation and more importantly insights on what dimension(s) should be focused on to achieve the desired level of maturity. This is where we apply a “Stages of Excellence” approach which serve to orientate companies by providing a benchmark for performance.
“Stages of Excellence” summarize the main characteristics a company must have at respective maturity levels as a benchmark which allows the organization to compare “where it is now” and “where it wants to be in future” in terms of its performance.
At the highest maturity level, the organization takes a proactive attitude about challenging circumstances impacting the financial health of the company, and has the capabilities to anticipate significant events impacting tax and accounting practices, as well as compliance. Account-to-Report mastery also implies that the finance department is advanced in the way it operates and can focus attention on achieving efficiencies and perfecting financial management processes while minimizing increases in costs and risks.
For further details on the approach, please refer to the full article.
The assessment is captured into a comprehensive report enabling prioritizing measures and initiatives for reaching the next maturity level.
For whom is the maturity assessment useful? When can it be applied?
Our maturity assessment offers a pragmatic approach to evaluate the performance of an organization because it gives an insight to areas of improvement and helps setting realistic goals. It can be used by CFOs to assess and benchmark Finance operations across the enterprise. Moreover, our maturity assessment is useful for Finance Department Heads as it offers insights on specific areas of operations for improvement. Business Transformation Managers and Process Managers also benefit from a maturity assessment as it provides them a toolkit that can be applied prior to, during, and after the business transformation initiative.
For inquiries on the Account-to-Report maturity survey and how to conduct an assessment for your organization please feel free to contact me.
Best regards
Ikemefuna Allen