Business Process Experts becomes bpExperts

-Jochen König

Working to support our customers in business transformations with services and products we have updated our company name and graphic design to express our focus and dedication: bpExperts is clearly to the point and driving business process innovation.

2012 when we decided to create our own firm we had a very clear idea of what the core of this company should be: Consulting customers on analyzing their existing business processes and catalyzing the design and implementation of new and improved ones. And it would have to be done based on a thorough methodology and honed in years of hands-on expertise of what actually works.

Brooding about potential names for the enterprise we first tried all sorts of acronyms and puns based on the founders names and even experimented with creating a flashy neologisms as has been fashionable at the time with companies in life science and finance. But none of the options outperformed the down-to-earth descriptive name we eventually went for: Business Process Experts

This name describes perfectly well who we are and indicates what we do. The only drawback is: 24 characters, not even counting the 5 additional needed to append the " GmbH"! Ever tried to fit that into a visitor reception form? Forget it! Our customers quickly took a pragmatic approach and referred to us by our web domain and so did most colleagues internally.

Valuing experience-rooted, goal oriented pragmatism over blind orthodoxy we feel it is high time to formally adopt the name that expresses our origin and ambition, and that clearly works: bpExperts

Seizing the opportunity we also brushed up our logo and web appearance harmonizing it with our Business Flows brand. The new design expresses the clarity and stringency we implemented in our business process reference model and project operations. The bright yellow and the interwoven arrows symbolize the agility we gain when working from a solid foundation and open collaboration.

I hope you like the new look as much as we do!

Business Flows Release 3 available

- Rachael Föcker

When we created our Business Flows reference model and set of best practice methodology over three years ago, our objective was to provide a simple process repository for everybody. The challenge we saw, was finding the right balance of being specific as well as being relevant for a wide range of customers.

The use cases and feedback from customers show that we accomplished this job well, but also let us think about what we can do developing it further.
Since the beginning of the year we have been working on upgrading model contents, conventions and methodologies and are now happy to announce the new release. version 3, of Business Flows.

The main points we have changed or added for the current release are

Additional Content (Domains, Scenarios)

We now cover several additional domains:

• Lead to Opportunity (L2O)

• After Sales and Services (ASS),

• Forecast to Plan (F2Pl) and

• Master Data Management (MDM)

Especially ASS and MDM are hot topics as many industrial companies strategically want to transform their business model more towards offering services and solutions rather than just products. This in combination with ever shorter product-innovation-cycle-times and growing markets has a massive impact on master data processes.
They need to become better integrated, faster and more reliable in order to facilitate the core processes.

Simplified role model

We have decided to discontinue the roles on BPMN level and just provide the department role on process level.

The feedback on the value of roles associated with individual processes and process steps was ambivalent as most customers have very individual organizations and corresponding role definition and naming. The added value of having an example was diminished by the discussions on how best to adapt to the actual situation.
Also, frequently - depending on size of departments and organization the role model has to be more differentiated or sometimes less differentiated.

Use case related content in detailed process charters in BPMN

We encounter two main types of use cases for the most detailed process level modeled in BPMN:

• Act as a modeling template to be copy/adjusted rather than starting on a white modeling canvas.

• Provide content on the main activities, the degrees of automation, inputs/outputs etc in order to facilitate process workshops and business requirements sessions.

We think the latter use case is of greater value to Business Flows users for which we provide the BPMN processes and have decided to focus on accumulating relevant information into dedicated sections. We call this the process charter. 

The models still comply with the BPMN notation but are now structured according to the fixed scheme shown below.

Each process charter contains two core lanes representing the Happy Flow and the Exception Handling.

Where the Happy Flow indicates the best practice processing, the Exception Handling supports process workshops as they indicate the essential questions to be clarified prior to a detail design.

Additionally where available, stewardship documents covering essential business requirements such as policies, guidelines, risks and controls are included.

Value Flows

The accounting impacts of business operations are often unknown or unclear to business professionals from purchasing, production planning, and sales & distribution. By the same token, experience has shown that Finance & Controlling departments are repeatedly left in the dark during process design phases of major business transformation initiatives.

Value Flows represent the impact of business activities and events in Finance and Controlling to trigger the discussion between Operations and Financial and Managerial Accounting. 

Value Flows enrich process documentation by establishing cross references between Key Value Flow topics within a business such as ‘Cost Of Goods Sold’ (COGS), inventory postings, and related E2E scenarios.

Value Management Framework

Business transformation is all about operationalising strategies. With our Value Management Framework we offer a structured approach on how to derive and prioritize your business drivers from your companies strategy and identify the appropriate scope and value drivers in order to achieve your objectives.

Our framework is inspired by SCOR performance attributes (strategic pillars) and metrics. Business Drivers represent trending industry hot topics for each strategic pillar. Whereby Value Drivers represent industry best practices required to achieve transformation objectives. Last but not least, System Capabilities (S/4HANA) provide the foundation for your solution design.

Although the content of the above mentioned features are all prepared not everything is already available in the customer portal yet. We shall be publishing it step-wise over the next weeks in order to have finalized the publishing by mid September. Just in time for our customer event.