Insights - Business Transformation Day 2022 - Schloss Krickenbeck

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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 :

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!

Business Transformation Day - Schloss Krickenbeck

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

Markus Wolf

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. 

Synopsis - bpExpert's Business Transformation Day 2019 @ Merck

Depending on the objective of your BPM initiative your process documentation will differ in its underlying architecture and methodology, the manner in which processes are described and what artifacts are attached to them. However, all sustainable initiatives share one thing: They succeed in providing a common structure and business dictionary to enable communication.

On the 26th of September, we had the pleasure that our 7th annual customer event was hosted by Merck in Darmstadt. The agenda of the day you can find here. I’d like to express my deepest thanks to our hosts and would like to give a synopsis of the presentations and break-out sessions we had:

The first presentation showed us that multiple business area-specific ERP templates can be managed within one BPM framework at Merck. How the “abstract” process world from an ERP template can be linked to the operations of organizations within one particular country. It was explained how a common structure enables an industrialized roll-out approach from business roles to authorizations and training.

Participants of bpExpert’s 7th annual customer event in Darmstadt

Having achieved the objective of supporting first-time rollouts, the next challenge is transforming the BPM organization to enable them for a combined rollout and run mode.

This was the topic of the second speaker from Phoenix Contact. Since 2003, empowered by a strong mandate of senior management, Phoenix contact established a strictly governed process lifecycle management. Among the benefits of having a common process language worldwide and a single source of truth are high internal customer satisfaction, business insights into harmonization potentials, internal benchmarks, and easy comparison and evaluation of processes. Not for free – challenges and constant efforts to maintain a strong community over so many years and to administer a holistic process management set-up must be mentioned.

A great example of how a common process language acts as a catalyst for boosting improvements and automation was given by the next speaker, responsible for BPM in R&D at Merck Healthcare. The objective, in this case, was not efficiency but effectiveness. Effectiveness in the collaboration between the different departments within the R&D organization and beyond. In a short period of time and with an approach of small incremental steps, the project succeeded in adding structure to the assignments of responsibilities, in interactions and handovers. With this, the guardrails on the way towards a consolidated landscape of quality documents (e.g. procedures and related information) were defined and thus the space for creativity and innovation in a highly regulated environment was enlarged.

Giving freedom for adjustments of process documentation to reflect the nature of different areas within a research-driven organization while keeping everything together in one structure was the topic of the presentation by Miltenyi Biotec. Objectives such as efficiency and better collaboration had to be in line with out-of-the-silo thinking as well as regulatory compliance. All this for building the basis for future digitalization. A comprehensive but robust and simple structure combined with easy comprehensible and uniform process mapping enables a broad communication and collaboration among empowered contributors and fosters active ownership and encourages taking responsibility.

In break-out sessions and individual conversations in smaller groups throughout the day, all participants elaborated on the various aspects of the presented initiatives and shared their individual insights under the motto “What’s in it for me”. Some of the highlights from this sessions where the benefit of integrating classic LEAN tools like SIPOC sheets (supplier, input, process, output, customer) on a higher level of the process architecture, different approaches towards governance and approval workflows, ways of stakeholder management and connecting the individual to the whole, and – across all the different facets of change – BPM does not replace communication but it enables it with the provided structure and common process language.

Please feel free to comment or reach out to me personally if you are interested in discussing any of the above-mentioned topics. And for sure we will be glad to greet you to our next year’s event.