Insights - 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 :

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. 

Business Flows Release 4 Available Now

- Rachael Föcker

Business Flows Release 4

Since our last release in July 2018, we have reflected on our project experience and customer feedback and spent the last several months improving Business Flows once again. From our experience in Business Transformation and process design initiatives, it is clear is that an End to End (E2E) perspective fosters operational excellence. The principle is to iteratively define a standard set of processes and (re)use these in various combinations to reflect all operational varieties in the business flows.

For the sake of ‘house-keeping’ this set of (unique) processes requires a structured view on the process inventory. This is typically accomplished in a repository by sorting the processes into process groups according to functional criteria.

We, frankly speaking, didn’t publish the process groups until now, as we didn’t want to distract from the core E2E focus of Business Flows.

Using Business Flows in various customer situations has shown that a reference model for the functional grouping of processes as well as a structured repository (defining the business process master list, BPML) is of great benefit.

We are, therefore, happy to announce that we have updated our published architecture and conventions in order to bring you another perspective to Release 4 of our Best Practice Reference Model: Process Groups.   

Process Groups

The introduced process groups are structured according to the SCOR top-level entry structure. Leaning on this widely used framework simplifies initial orientation for process experts with various backgrounds without limiting us to functional silo thinking.

Our Process Groups cluster individual processes in a functional representation similar to operational departments. For example, within the Customer Relationship Management functional group you will find a collection of processes for strategically shaping the relationships and interactions of an organization with existing and potential customers, including planning and execution of campaigns, gathering and qualification of leads, and the generation and distribution of marketing materials. Our classified functional building blocks offer a streamlined approach to gather the relevant business experts to review, adapt, and agree the reference model according to their business operations. In this sense, the combination of the Process Library and E2E view accelerate adapting operational processes to support company strategy. 

We adopted established SCOR framework terminology across the supply chain: source, make, store, sell, and service and extend it by design, plan, service, integrated management system, enterprise management, and quality & compliance management. 

Figure 1: Process Library

In addition to providing a functional view on processes, the process groups also allow us to accommodate for stand alone processes that do not typically map to an E2E process such as generation of reports, modification of sales order or purchase orders, or maintenance of Master Data processes that needs to be included in a comprehensive BPML.

With the introduction of the process groups, we have taken the initiative to replace the generic departments on the level 2 processes with the respective process group allocation indicating functional responsibility.  This decision was made to incorporate feedback on frictions when customers were mapping the reference content to their individual organizations and corresponding role definition and naming.

Figure 2: E2E Scenario - Inbound Logistics

As I write this the team has started working working on the next release of Business Flows where we will provide you with new E2E domains including Forecast to Plan (F2Pl) and Hire to Retire (H2R) with their respective process groups covering Human Resources, Sales and Operations Planning and others.

We are curious to receive your feedback and why not discuss the new concept and content live at our customer event in September - so save the date and come to exchange on how business transformation is a capability, not a project!

In case you want to have a closer look at our reference content, feel free to get yourself a free trail.