Generating Business Value with Business Process Management (BPM) – How to Engage with Universities to Continuously Develop BPM Capabilities

Jan vom Brocke, ERCIS – European Research Center for Information Systems, University of Münster, Germany

Business Process Management (BPM) has matured into a comprehensive management approach that has proven to deliver better processes in many cases, specifically, more efficient, cost-effective, and reliable processes. Today, many companies see the potential of BPM to achieve further important strategic goals, such as resilience, agility, and sustainability. At the same time, however, many companies find it difficult to realise this potential in their day-to-day business. Specifically, the body of knowledge in BPM is still very much centered around process models and thus fails to deliver the expected business value.

In this talk, I will share how new ways of university-business relations have helped many organisations to continuously develop their BPM capabilities according to their individual strategic goals and contextual requirements. Specifically, I will take the case of the European Research Centre for Information Systems ERCIS, a network of over 30 universities across Europe (and beyond) with a distinct profile in BPM. The ERCIS partners have more than 20 years of experience in accompanying companies in their BPM endeavours at international scale. I will talk about both the process of collaboration and some of the key artifacts that have come out of this collaboration, such as the BPM Billboard.

Against this background, I would like to open a discussion with the audience on how such cooperation can be further shaped. I would like to learn what the main challenges are that participants face today and what kind of support they would benefit from most. I believe that in our fast-moving times, practice increasingly benefits from continuous research involvement, just as research benefits from continuous practice involvement. I would like to showcase and discuss how a design-oriented mode of engagement can help to exploit synergies between research, practice, and education in BPM.

Jan vom Brocke is the Chair of Information Systems & Business Process Management at the University of Münster in Germany and is Director of ERCIS – The European Research Center for Information Systems. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Liechtenstein, and he has been named a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), a Fellow of the ESCP Center for Design Science in Entrepreneurship, and a Schoeller Senior Fellow at Friedrich Alexander University (FAU) in Germany. He has published in, among others, Management Science, Management Information Systems Quarterly (MISQ), Information Systems Research (ISR), Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS), Journal of Information Technology (JIT), Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS), European Journal of Information System (EJIS), Information Systems Journal (ISJ), Journal of Strategic Information Systems (JSIS), Communications of the ACM (CACM), and MIT Sloan Management Review (SMR). Jan has published many seminal BPM books, including the International Handbook of Business Process Management as well as the comprehensive Business Process Management Cases collection. He has teaching experience in BPM from many of the Financial Times Top ranked Business Schools, such as the University of St.Gallen in Switzerland and the Smurfit School of Business in Ireland. Professor vom Brocke is an invited speaker and serves as trusted advisor to many companies as well as governmental institutions across Europe.

Jason Dietz has worked for Tesco since 1990 and has experience in retail commercial and data managment. He has undertaken roles in Stores and more recently in the head office in Welwyn Garden City.  Jason headed up change and project teams pecifically looking at processes. With the  introduction of the Tesco groups Services model, Jason has set up the Process Architecture function. Working with Software AG Tesco has built and operates a global BPM system.

Jasper van Hattem is engagement manager at Apolix, meaning that he is responsible for the successful delivery of Celonis implementations through project management and strategic alignment with stakeholders. During his time at Apolix he has delivered a wide variety of process mining projects, ranging from core processes such as accounts payables and order management, to non-standard processes such as nautical processes for ports, trade settlement processes, and health clinic processes, which he is more than happy to tell you more about.

Sandy Kemsley is an industry analyst and technical strategy consultant specializing in digital process automation. With many years of hands-on systems implementation experience, she works with large organizations on their digital transformation strategy and implementation projects, and creates thought-leadership content for software vendors to educate their customers on the technology landscape and how it applies to business use cases.

She writes a popular process management blog at column2.com, is a featured conference and webinar speaker on process automation and digital transformation, and is a contributing author to books on social BPM and adaptive case management. She is the winner of the 2016 Marvin L. Manheim award for significant contributions in the field of workflow, and recipient of the 2019 Workflow Management Coalition’s award for Outstanding Business Transformation Consultant.

Air France KLM Martinair Cargo transports cargo using the available aircraft of the airlines in the group. Within this organization, business analysts, business architects, and business process managers are involved in creating and managing knowledge about the organization’s processes. They possess the necessary expertise and tools to set up Business Process Management (BPM) and both top management and experts are convinced about the importance of having a comprehensive overview of their processes. However, the organization’s capabilities to manage and control business processes, like BPM, still need to be improved. For example, some issues that are encountered are:

• An agile way of working appears to work great but often only for one department; there is no integral view across the organization.
• People participating in development tend to use the language of systems, interfaces, and APIs over the language of processes and business functions.
• Projects are focusing more on the How question than first determining the What question.
• Time-to-market is often used as an excuse to skip business thinking.
• A long-term business vision is formulated but a roadmap from a functional perspective is difficult to construct.
• The organization applies too many solutions to the same problem.

Based on this, the key question that will be covered in this challenge is: which activities will help Air France KLM Martinair Cargo in solving these issues and grow into a more business process-oriented organization? Where to start?

Tesco is a British grocery retailer, with its headquarters in the United Kingdom. The Tesco Group also includes: Tesco Bank; Tesco Mobile; a network of One Stop convenience stores; the UK’s leading wholesale business, Booker, and a data-science business, dunnhumby.

From a BPM perspective Tesco strives to implement a global process framework to support standardization where possible while leaving various degrees of freedom for business lines or operating companies to optimize “locally”. However, business models change over time and so do operating models.

This presents some significant difficulties, including:

1. How to accommodate a variety of (evolving) business models in a single process framework?
2. How to democratize processes?
3. How to optimize with experiences from other experts, like other stakeholders, such as suppliers?
4. How to consolidate best practice BPM ways of working?

In this session, we will try to address these problems. Together, we will determine the core problem and find a solution.

Process architecture for municipalities: with or despite GEMMA? 

Dutch municipalities work with GEMMA (GEMeentelijkelijke ModelArchitectuur) – Reference Architecture for Municipalities) for their information management. This contains a collection of architectural reference frameworks and guidelines provided by the VNG, the Dutch Association of Municipalities.

Although these models are very insightful, they tend to focus more on the technical aspects than on the implications of managing business processes. This makes it hard to translate these reference models into an easy to use and comprehensive process architecture. There currently is no one size fits all approach so most process architects either choose their own approaches with (or despite) the GEMMA reference models or develop no process architecture at all.

Every approach comes with specific decisions that not only affect implementation of changes specific laws and regulations (e.g. environmental code), but also affect management of municipality processes in general. What are these different approaches, what can we learn from them and what do scientists have to offer?

The key question is: How can we create a clear and generic approach for translating GEMMA to a process architecture that works for change management as well as process management within Dutch municipalities?

Nederlandse Spoorwegen (Dutch Railways – NS) is the largest national carrier for passenger rail service. It is supported by a large IT department that manages many systems and processes. Process Mining has been a topic of interest for several years. Proof of concepts have proved the viability of process mining as a technology to improve the quality and timeliness of our processes, as well as lower costs. Process mining is now designated as one of NS’s ‘Top technologies’ and is part of the company’s innovation platform. Now the goal is to further mature process mining as a capability in the organization and work towards the goal of a data driven organization. There are several challenges on the path towards this goal, which we will address in this workshop.

Challenges:

1. Insights leading to action
   

Although the organization is aware of the added value of process mining and opportunities for process improvement are regularly identified, it is difficult to make use of insights from process mining to initiate changes in the business. Management and business partners are often enthusiastic about the possibilities that process mining brings, and data is usually available. However, the commitment to make use of the insights from process mining to perform continuous process improvement seems to be lacking. Process mining projects usually end in the delivery of a report or dashboard while failing to integrate process mining into the business domain.

Key questions:

• How can we ensure that process mining projects are successful in driving continuous process improvement?
• What are the barriers that prevent organizations from taking action based on process mining insights and how to overcome them?

2. Community building

Process mining is currently driven by one person who is specialized in supporting departments within NS that want to deploy process mining.  There is more knowledge about process mining available in the organization, however it is difficult to keep track of different initiatives and share knowledge due to the size of the organization. We are looking for ways to activate the community to help mature the capability of process mining.

Key questions:

• How can we activate the process mining community in NS to help mature the capability of process mining?
• What are the challenges and opportunities for building knowledge about process mining in a large organization?

3. Technological innovation

Process mining is often performed as a one-off project or proof of concept, mostly based on a single data dump. To further utilize the possibilities of process mining, we are looking to move towards process mining using (near)-realtime data and eventually for predictive analyses. To achieve this goal, we must find ways to improve data literacy and business process management maturity in the organization.

Key question:

• How can we improve business process management maturity and/or data literacy in the organization to support near-realtime process mining?