Business Process Management Project

During my tenure as CIO of a retail and distribution company, my primary role was to lead their digital transformation. I aimed to automate every activity that did not require the value addition of human intelligence. The first step in this journey was to analyze the existing state of affairs, from a process point of view, and thereafter identify areas of improvement to create a more efficient and effective organization.

I interviewed stakeholders of each department and codified their otherwise unwritten existing processes over a three-month period. It became evident through the process mapping exercise that there was overlap and/or a disconnect in many areas within and between departments, which led to one of more of these scenarios:?

·????Loss of manhours due to underutilization of resources or repetition of tasks

·????Errors due to heavy dependence on manual inputs

·????Inter-department blame game due to overlapping responsibilities

·????Lack of data due to each department working outside of the organizations IT landscape

·????Demoralized employees due to uncertainty on R&R

In light of the above, it became evident that a new BPM was required in the organization.

What is a BPM?

BPM - Business Process Management is the most critical activity that entails in-depth study of the role and responsibility of each individual department and it’s input to produce the desired results. The review must question every single action that may be excessive/repetitive to improve efficiency and include new steps to ensure higher quality output. It should be well defined actions with optimum timelines and mapped to IT systems to pave the path to automation.

With all the inputs gathered, I developed a comprehensive value chain process (up to Level-3) by defining every business function, their activities, actors, inputs, outputs, process workflows and their SLAs/KPIs. This eventually helped us automate all the business functions like sales, marketing, HR, finance & accounts, procurement, logistics and after-sales service.?

The benefits of defining the value chain were as follows:

·????Running of everyday operations more efficiently

·????Improve and optimize tangled operations

·????Create, map, analyze, and improve business processes

·????Integrate between existing systems like ERP, E-Com, HCM and CRM

·????Closely track individual items as they move through an approval workflow

·????The documents were digitally circulated within the organization and with the customers

In summary, the crafted BPM helped streamline and automate operations between both inter and intra department. The structured processes built in transparency and accountability. From an external perspective, the BPM set and managed expectations for suppliers, partners and customers. Overall, the company benefitted unquantifiable by improving quality of operations and quantifiably by reducing upwards of 5,000 manhours a year which was otherwise going towards manual and/or repetitive activities.