It used to be my father, now it's me.

Years ago, when I lived with my parents, my father would switch off the lights at home that were not needed, usually left on by the heedless amongst the family like myself. Now I do it in my house. I read somewhere that Queen Elizabeth does it in Buckingham Palace. It appears to be an abiding ritual hardwired into the oldest person in a household. Without doubt it was a money saving exercise on my father's part "money doesn't grow on trees" after all - and there is an element of that in my behaviour as well. But there is more.

Global warming and climate change are real threats to the stable future of our planet. I have kids and I want them to have a planet as good as I had, and I want their kids to have it too. This will only happen if we change our habits and making those changes should start now.

We have already reduced our ecological footprint a little as part of a house renovation a couple of years ago - rainwater tanks piped to the toilets, wide eaves, heat sink flooring for catching the winter sun, instant gas hot water rather than preheated storage. There's more we could do without a doubt but that is a start. I would love to go solar but the costs are prohibitive at the moment - the Australian government should be heavily underwriting domestic solar power rather than considering building massive infrastructure for more coal and nuclear power plants

In a world first the World Wildlife Fund is organising the Earth Hour in Sydney during March 2007 - an hour in which they are encouraging everybody, residential and corporate, to switch off all lights for 60 minutes from 7.30pm on 31 March. The aim is to reduce the city's greenhouse gas pollution. I like this idea, switch off those lights, make it a habit.

Why DSO is important in debt collection

Another of my interests and roles is the stewardship of our debt collection/credit control module, SunSystems Collect. I have been remiss in not including my thoughts on that area in this blog. Today I was drafting an article for another forum and thought it pertinent to add here.

Days Sales Outstanding (DSO)

DSO is probably one of the most critical performance metrics in the debt collection process. It tells you the average number of days sales still outstanding based on the period of activity assessed. It is worth noting that DSO measures the efficiency of your collections in terms of how quickly the invoices are converted to cash rather than the effectiveness of your collections in terms of what activities result in the best client behaviour.

The most common base calculation is:
[total receivables]
first divided by [credit sales value for the period]
and then multiplied by [number of days in sales period].

SunSystems Collect has a number of algorithms built in which are detailed extensively including work-through examples in the reference manual.

A low DSO is good and means clients pay their invoices in a timely manner, a high DSO means clients pay slowly and quite probably late. A high DSO means the company is using its own cash to fund the business rather than recovering cash owed to it by clients and using that to fund the business. When you go out to replenish product stock (or whatever) it is a far healthier position to be in paying with money from sales than money from your savings.

If the client DSO value is close to the client payment terms then they are behaving well, however if for example the terms are 30 days and the DSO is 60 days then you have some work to do. A low DSO can also be a health indicator for the client - happy clients pay their bills.

There are no exact good and bad values for DSO however there are forums for most industries where membership will include access to common benchmarks, best in class etc. As an example, for some industries if your payment terms are 30 days then a common and reasonably achievable goal is to keep DSO in the low 40's. Best in class would probably be consistently sub 40 days.

Collect also allows you to analyse the DSO over time by various dimensions. So you may want to see DSO trends broken out by account manager, and perhaps also by project or product. Measuring your collections staff by DSO can create a healthy competitive atmosphere where people strive to better eachother in keeping the DSO down for their allocated accounts. When a collector only has time for one more phone call in the afternoon they should perhaps target it at a client that most counts from a DSO perspective.

Some organisations use the value of a single days DSO as the target for sales/account managers to agitate their clients to settle outstanding dues. If each account manager succeeds in reducing your DSO by a day then you will have recovered a meaningful amount of cash back into the business at virtually no cost of sale. For some organisations they discover that reducing their DSO by 10 days is worth more to the business than increasing sales by 10%.

DSO is well worth focusing on for your collections activity.

EBIT = Earnings Before IT

Thoroughly enjoyed the Christmas User Group and drinkies at one of our partners this week. They produce a fantastic process mapping and modelling suite that just goes from strength to strength - some very smart guys. This tool is becoming pivotal in how some of our clients approach their business improvement and I will elaborate a bit more another time.

One of the team was regaling us with stories from a previous job in the retail space - he had a client that referred to EBIT as Earnings before IT. Before IT they opened the shipping container, counted up what was in there, shipped to the stores, put a price tag on it and sold it - easy, cheap, very profitable.

Then they grew beyond the "mom and pop" size and started installing technology driven systems - and this is where they claimed their problems started. The system demanded that you receipted the container contents based on what was ordered and what was on the bill of lading. Unfortunately most of the suppliers were shipping from China where the main aim was to fill the container and get it off the dock rather than worry about little things like PO details.

In the old days, the retailer didn't really care what arrived as long as the container was full and on time (DFOT rather than DIFOT!), but "IT" didn't like this - if the order says "100 widgets" and the bill of lading says "100 widgets" then there better be "100 widgets" or we have an exception situation. Up went the costs, down went the profits - "bring back the Earnings Before IT".

We all shook our heads and had a good laugh - but it is a salient point to remember - don't try to lock down the business rules around what "should" be if the business doesn't really aspire to live to those rules in the first place.

SunPundits building SunSystems user community

I came across SunPundits a few months ago and posted a comment or two on SunSystems Collect which is our debt collection / credit control module for SunSystems. It was pretty embrionic at the time but I like the idea and the premise - sharing tips and tricks on operational issues around Infor SunSystems at a grass roots level.

I dropped back in on the group the other day and was pleased to see lots more activity and plenty of calls for assistance and advice responded to in an accurate and timely way. This bodes very well for building the community to a meaningful level. I did my bit with a few updates and will keep an eye on my patch from now on.

As a software author I love the idea of the user base building a self-service attitude to addressing some support issues - at a purely commercial level it has the opportunity to reduce the pressure on the support desk. But that is just a small benefit - the real gain is to hear how genuine end users put the products to use, how they implement their business processes within the constraints of the application, what they struggle to achieve, what they want to add, what they love and hate.

We can learn how we can do better directly from the people that really matter - the end users. Bring it on.

Disaster Recovered

We had an interesting corporate experience the other week - our Melbourne office basement was flooded with 7 feet of water by a burst main on Sunday night. The building was closed down until it could be pumped out and re-certified for safe occupancy. Now this is not a 2-up-2-down humpy in the suburbs, this is a major sky scraper in the Melbourne CBD - a significant event. Press coverage here for more details. I am based in Sydney and was not directly affected but my colleague Tim Wragg was peering through the door at the chaos and brings some personal experience to the event.

What I thought would be worth sharing is the basic learnings for us from what could have been a lot more catastrophic than it was. There were probably three main areas of recovery - people, systems and real estate - to get our business back to normal - and it was of primary importance that our clients experienced as little disruption as possible.

The problem with the real estate was that in the affected building all the electricity and communications terminals were in the basement and therefore completely debilitated by the flooding. So regardless of any plans for dual carriers etc, everything was wiped out. Also because the building occupancy certification was cancelled by the council and would not be reissued until after the water was pumped out we were not allowed to have people at the desks anyway.

Many of our corporate systems are delivered from a central Sydney infrastructure so the main operational functions that needed to be switched over were the telephone help desks. That was done in short order without any problem and only seconds of interruption to service, probably unnoticed by anyone. We also flew a few of those team members to Sydney for the week to continue business as usual in that area. We already run a full VPN based framework to allow people to work from home, on site at clients, whilst travelling overseas etc so the physical location of the teams affected was not a concern. We didn't need to rush out and get temporary desk space - the combination of mobile phones and Internet access allowed most people to work as normal, just from a different physical place.

People - this was the trickiest area - how do you notify large volumes of people that the office is not open and they should stay at home or arrange to work from a client site (for those in consultancy roles). Well bulk SMS was the way we did it and it worked reasonably well - for the employees with company issued mobile phones that is. Within 2 hours of notification by the building management we had passed on the initial "stay at home, await further instructions" alert. Of course there are lots of people in the business that do not have a corporate mobile phone and the lesson learned was that we did not have accurate up-to-date mobile numbers for many of these people so there was a fair amount of time spent dialling land lines. Even still a few were missed and had to be repelled at the door.

Also, the SMS system that we used required data entry of the target phone numbers for the text message - when time is of the essence this is not ideal - so we have changed the bulk SMS system we use to one that allows us to keep an online list "ready to go". We will also be updating our corporate processes to ensure we capture and update these details for employees in future.

Some people responded that they had left their laptop pcs in the office over the weekend and we were lucky enough to be able to access the building under supervision to recover these and a few desktop pcs for key staff. If this hadn't been possible then some individuals would have been left in the lurch whilst we cobbled together spare machines for them.

As it was, although the building was out of commission for a full week we were remarkably well protected from the affects of a lock-out. The real question is what shape would we have been in if it had been the Sydney building that was uninhabitable and we are assessing that in light of the Melbourne event.

Walk out the front door of your office, lock it and shut off the lights and think about what you would do to get back up and running. Document it - that's the start of your disaster recovery/business continuity plan.

Old pain salved, new pain surfaces

Process improvement is a funny old thing when you look at it over an extended period of time. When the journey started the focus was about relieving some very explicit "pain" in the system and all thought, money and effort would have been addressed to that task. Over time that pain was dulled and was replaced by another "pain" further along the system. Again with time and money this second pain abated - only to be replaced by a third and a fourth etc etc.

As you travel around the continuous improvement mouse-wheel you never get to the end of the pain and of course in reality you probably never will. There is always something else that is the "next best pain" to salve.

The frustrating part for the pain doctors can be the lack of thanks from the patients. Very occasionally you come across people who have been there from the start and still vividly remember the excruciating pain that triggered the whole relationship in the first place - and they realise that the current pain is invariably far less than those of times gone by - and they know it will get eased - and they thank you with a smile and their patience and understanding around the challenges of today - and it is a pleasure.

The 80/20 improvement kicker

Another comment by one of the BPMG Sydney chapter attendees was very pertinent - he claimed in a recent process improvement project that 98% of the benefits came from only 2% of the improvements and all of them were human related process improvements. Now that is a huge ratio and if you were the sponsor looking back at that you would probably be frustrated at the return on investment (ROI) for the other 98% - that budget could have been spent on something else.

I am a big proponent of the 80/20 rule (officially known as the Pareto Principle). Just for the fun of it let's say that most projects have the same outcome, 80% benefit from 20% of the improvement. Turning that into value, 80% ROI comes from 20% investment - as opposed to the other side where only 20% ROI comes from a massive 80% investment.

So 80/20 gives you a 4 times payback whereas 20/80 gives you a measly 0.25 payback - I know which bank I would invest in.

The challenge of course is identifying in the project planning stage where that truly valuable 20% improvement goldmine actually is.

Do that and your project will soar with the eagles.

BI is nothing without process focus

We hosted the BPMG Sydney Chapter meeting this evening and there was some spirited discussion on a range of topics - the one that tickled my fancy was a forceful statement from a Professor in academia.

" BI is nothing without process focus" - and it rings so true - in fact I have blogged it separately here. You can measure to your hearts content and configure dashboards and guages and graphs and "top 10's" until you are blue in the face but until you link the data source to process and the decision outcome from the metrics back to process they are all pretty meaningless.

If you are going to build a BI capability then it may be wise to consider the various levels of KPI applicabale in the business. There will be the strategic KPIs pointing to market share, territory volume sales etc, then there are the process group style KPIs such as inventory management etc, and then there are the individual task KPIs such as supplier invoices with POs declared, DIFOT ratios etc.

When looking at KPIs you need to know how they interrelate to each and what the actual value chain of the business is. Then as the metrics show signs of offending benchmarks you know where to go looking down the line for the problems - and those problems will always be process issues. You have to link performance and process together for both a healthy, wholistic view of the business and also to know how to react when things show signs of stress.

My B-Performance-M = B-Process-M hypothesis was reinforced.

Talk about an NAO headache

I've covered New Account Opening here before and the other week I had a meeting with a client that has a monster NAO headache. They are a global organisation running a centralised implementation of SunSystems with 200+ separate operating entities in the enterprise.

Many of the businesses operate in common territories so the rationalisation and management of suppliers is a fiscally and administratively sensible strategy. Easier said than done of course because after you have decided to trade with a new supplier you have a monster job to update all the relevant businesses in the territory with a great potential for human error - oh, and did anyone mention SOX compliancy?

Workflow for SunSystems to the rescue - they "get it" and they got it and they are rolling it out for Christmas!

Browser delivered process automation for core operational tasks like this is a no-brainer. It covers all corners of the threat trinity - risk, cost and compliance. The install is quick, the uptake is quick, the wins are quick and the ROI is a pleasure.

Ask me for a free MSAS cube building script for SunSystems

We have been building OLAP cubes over SunSystems for some time now and more and more the realisation dawns in people's heads that process and performance are just two different ends of the same spectrum. I have blogged on this topic before and won't torture you with any more on that (yet).

What I will do is offer interested parties a free - yes, that's right, gratis and for nothing - SQL script that you can run against your SunSystems MS SQL database to build a little Microsoft Analysis Services OLAP data warehouse.

You will then need a snazzy viewer to allow you to look at your data in a way that you have never seen it before and truly turn it into "information". We recommend Executive Viewer - it is one of those user display tools that just blows people's socks off - and it does exactly what it says on the box - lets executives view their data in a browser (without doing any damage) and allows them to dream up almost any spontaneaous (crack pot) way of wanting to view the data without having to come back to system support to get a report written.

So - do you want a free SunSystems cube builder? What I will need from you is your company name, an email address and your SunSystems serialisation number, then I can make the magic happen.

By the way, this comes with no formal support because once you start tinkering with the script (and I know you, you will!) all bets are off - if you break it, call somone who cares! (I'm not that heartless actually, come back to me and I can give a little help around the edges).

09 Nov 2006 update - While I'm at it, I'll give away a Time @ Work cube builder for those interested - same deal as with the SunSystems one.

Respond to this post in confidence - I won't publish the recipients.

The difference from LHR to Kingsford Smith in Sydney

Time has passed and I have calmed down over the Heathrow shocker (although it still gets me hot under the collar when I think of it) sufficiently to do a little comparison with the people and processes at the airport in my home town of Sydney.

We have a tricky thing called curfew here that restricts flight arrivals prior to 6.00am - and fair enough, the airport is close into the city and surrounded by residential areas. So at 6.01am planes start to pour out of the sky into the airport - we were 3rd to touch down and I watched out the window whilst we taxied to the terminal and there seemed to be one ever 2.5 minutes back to back, headlights twinkling in the distance.

So duty free, immigration and customs are swamped as thousands of people pour down the aisles. Generally the queue moved quickly and efficiently - first sign of a problem at the immigration desk and the offender was whisked off to a separate area for processing and the bulk of us weren't held up. (There is a bit of smarts in the commercial sector as well - the exit from duty free (booze, perfume and tobacco products mainly) funnels you into a dedicated passport/immigration queue rather than back into the main queue which means you aren't penalised for stopping for that last minute gift - now that's joined-up thinking.)

Baggage pick up is a tricky area and a little slow and that is due partly to every bag being xrayed on its way from the plane to the carousel. Then there is the queue through the green and red customs channel and this is where the queue really built up last trip. Australia has very strict quarentine laws, we don't have many of the agricultural nasties that the rest of the world has - think mad-cow, foot-and-mouth, rabies for starters - and customs takes a very hard line on stopping unprocessed foodstuffs entering the country with international travellers. Unfortunately many arriving passengers either don't understand, don't "get it" or don't care and forget to mention the fruit/dairy products/pigs innards that are in their luggage as gifts for their Aussie mates.

You approach the customs queue with a little declaration card you filled in on the plane. This is where Sydney whips Heathrow big time - there were people all the way down the line checking the forms, guiding you into the correct queues, confirming your understanding of the rules and regulations, pointing out the dump bins for discarding those forbidden fruits.

So there could be no mistaking where you were to go and what was expected of you long before you got to the top of the queue. That's the way it should be done - good signage and cheery, friendly people - a completely different experience.

These ushers had a little delegated authority as well. Scattered amongst the tourists were obvious local business travellers who know all the rules, have the frequent flyer baggage tags etc and they (including me!) were efficiently weeded out of the thronging mass and sent on their way after a swift bit of questioning.

This international travel thing is no longer any fun but the pain can be salved with a bit of common sense and courtesy. For some of course, hard work is easier than thinking.

Process chaos at London Heathrow

Having had the misfortune to pass through London Heathrow airport twice in the last few weeks I can personally vouch for the chaotic, careless, rude and unprofessional way in which that airport is processing its customers since the latest round of safety threats regarding UK to US flights and the threat of liquid explosives.

I fully acknowledge the (unfortunate) need for enhanced security measures and the added stress this entails for all parties in the international travel supply chain - however, the operations and behaviour I witnessed and experienced by the Heathrow systems and people was dismaying and disgraceful.

I traveled through LHR almost 3 weeks, and then again 4 weeks, after the security alert regarding liquid explosives occurred and I naively thought that they would have had their act together and systems and processes in place to be able to efficiently handle the congestion that the enhanced security measures would cause. I was sadly, badly and madly wrong - this place is a disaster. I am writing this 10 days later and it still makes me angry.

Let's just quickly summarise those additional security measures (which weirdly enough were rather inconsistently applied):

• reduced size hand luggage (a wooden board was attached to the top of the steel "does your hand baggage fit in here" frame - basically halving the width of the acceptable bag. Interestingly if your bag had soft sides and malleable contents and you could literally wrestle it through the slot that was OK! And business/first class was not restricted - I don't think terrorists intent on personal annihilation would be concerned about the price of the ticket they bought but obviously not a concern for LHR.
• no liquids or pastes of any sort allowed in hand luggage - very distressing for a lot of women who had to abandon their perfume and cosmetics
• all pocket contents, belts and footwear to be scanned at the security checkpoints into the departure areas
• thankfully they had relaxed the "no notebooks, cameras, mobile phones etc" policy as apparently a huge volume of these had been stolen during the period this was applied and I didn't want to join that statistic (says a lot about the security vetting in the HR recruitment process and exit controls for employees when thousands of expensive, portable items can be willfully stolen so easily).

OK - fair enough - restrictions were called for - although the smaller hand baggage allowance was certainly very inconsistently applied as I looked at people going through ahead of me all booking into similar flights and destinations - however I digress.

The nightmare started at dawn when arriving at Terminal 4 and transferring to Terminal 1 for a connecting flight. The human congestion was so bad that even the transfer buses were backing up, unable to disgorge their tired and grumpy passengers due to the queues ahead in the processing area. And this is where the shocking process and behaviour occurred.

Imagine a queue of many hundreds if not thousands, of passengers pouring in from all destinations and connecting on to many more being funneled into a single queue for security processing at the very front - idiocy. I got to the top of the queue to be told that my hand luggage, that had been acceptable out of Australia, was now too big for the new regime, so I had to join a different queue to check it in to the hold for my connecting flight. That's OK, I am happy to do that, but why have me wait in a line for 45 minutes to get that instruction? A sign and a size tester at the start of the queue would have had me processed and out of the way in seconds. Madness. And it was the same for fluids and pastes, only when you got to the top of the queue were you told there was another queue for those (and a tiny table on which to dump your offending liquids absolutely groaning under the pile of discarded items - this was not day one of the change - where was the big dumper bin?).

Throughout this nightmare a couple of uniformed comptrollers paraded up and down rebuffing all pleads for assistance in meeting tight connecting flight times - I literally heard an official snarl to an elderly woman in tears "that is your place in the queue now stay there" - disgraceful. (At another potential "flash point" area the supposed crowd management official was sitting behind a desk reading a novel whilst queue jumpers barged the doors and elderly couples started to faint).

So - that is my rant - but could I have done better? I don't know, I don't work in the business, I don't understand the constraints of the location, staffing, job demarcation, emergency legislation etc and haven't been exposed to their disaster/emergency planning and change management challenges. However, call me old fashioned, call me a fool, some simple "streaming" via large (and cheap) signage and cheery folk guiding and advising at the start of the queue would have been a massive productivity improvement in my opinion.

"If your bag doesn't fit in the size-slot go right - If you have fluids and pastes go left - If you have connecting flights within X mins from now join that queue - Everyone else join this queue". Not rocket science, not expensive, not hard, not training intensive.

How about having announcements in the buses on the way to the terminals - "you will soon be arriving at Terminal 1 and the security procedures are as follows ...... Please note that these will strictly be enforced and we advise you to pay attention to the signs and officials as you get off the bus" - hey, have it in a couple of languages too.

The Heathrow passenger processing methods were disgraceful, their communication was shocking, their people training would appear to have been appalling and there was no sign of improvement a week later when I did it all again so there was no intention of improvement. Very sad and a lesson in "how not to" for all of us interested in process.

Continuing the BPM journey - is it a map or a script?

So here you now sit with a finely honed process model in your hot and sticky hands. What do you do now? Well the first question to ask yourself is probably - is this a map of how to get somewhere or a script of how to do something? How you answer this will radically direct your next steps.

A map is the easy one - this process flow records the path that is taken to get from one point to another in the business continuum. It is something to be referred to if you lose your way or are starting on the journey and want to understand what the destination is. In effect this is a reference document and can be managed appropriately - published on the Intranet? Or bound into a handsome manual? How about laminating it and sticking it on the wall? (I know one company that was driven to dementia by the abuse of the kitchen facilities and the mess they were always being left in. So an impressive, colourful and explicit process map was drawn up that clearly identified the role of the dishwasher and the wiping cloth to those who were in doubt. Laminated of course for easy cleaning!). By the way, remember to keep it up to date as the landscape changes as there is nothing more frustrating to the intrepid traveler than an out-of-date map (this issue of currency is invariably a painful and tedious process and something I will be coming back to in due course).

The script is the harder answer to deliver against - for this means the process is to become procedural law, every time we perform this process, no matter by whom, these are the rules and regulations that are to be followed. This of course is the great challenge - how do you get everyone in the organisation to follow these laws? How do you communicate them? How do you implement them? How to you entice, enforce and police them? How do you handle the crises of non-compliance? This is the area where technology and the automation of business processes comes into their own - the land of the Business Process Management System/Suite.

But beware, before you launch off on the next great technology hunt, spare a thought for the herd of white elephants that may already be cluttering up your cupboards, there is little room in there for another, choose wisely and choose well!

Deconstructing BPM journey (1) and (2)

To read my previous posts on starting the BPM journey you could be mistaken in thinking any old fool could do this and what is the big deal about it all. Unfortunately the reality is that these type of improvemnet projects have a glorious history of failure or catastrophic under delivery. We recently ran an internal workshop of the core stakeholders of our own improvement project and the following points are straight from that forum - warts and all.

• these things take time and it needs to take time, you will not see all the options and complexities in the first pass
• look for the key influencers in the various pools of employees and look for high levels of involvement with these individuals
• the level of involvement of these indviduals will signify the level of takeup and enthusiasm later
• some people are habitual sniffers and just sit around the edge waiting for things to be proven for them
• without the support at least one of senior management and the business management the project will fail
• maintain credibility through the project - come clean about missed targets, changed objectives, challenges faced and not yet overcome etc
• you can only force people to turn up - they must be personally interested and motivated in improving the process (particularly if it is cross functional) to be able to achieve a quality outcome - if they don't give to the project then they will not achieve all the benefits possible to them
• people always underestimate the amount of time they will have to commit to the project - it is not a one meeting wonder session
• Visio is a reasonable one-dimensional tool and easy to use but the challenge is to cover all the interconnected layers of people, process and applications in a digestable and manageable ways - there are modelling tools available that do this better - we have now selected one to move forward with
• be prepared to be flexible and don't be surprised if things change around on you
• face reality as it is not as you would like to be
• communicate regularly and at appropriate times
• have the resources as available as possible when they are required for the project - if everything goes into stasis waiting for resources then the project is going to suffer in credibility
• do iterative boardroom prototype workshops with clear thinking stakeholders - more than once
• don't just follow the "happy path", question hard around where things go wrong, exceptions occur etc
• There are complicators and simplifiers - always hunt out the simplification - and be aware - it's amazing how complicated cultural issues can be
• think about the level of tolerance to compliance requirements that you may be happy to live with in line with your capacity just to "do business" - for some processes there may be zero tolerance, others may be less rigid
• you can't abdicate your process improvement to third parties - all good athletes have coaches and mentors but they have to run the race themselves - don't try to outsource the project, only the business can do it for itself
• think about setting up a "process office" so that as people come in and out of the project they are situated appropriately within the team for their involvement
• be organised and be seen to be so - if that is a problem for you then you are probably the wrong person to be managing this project
• "fight" for this internal project as hard as you would fight for a customer project
• An interesting point - when you get properly involved stakeholders workshopping around the table it is quite likely that technologies and BPM application/solutions etc don't get discussed
• Name the project other than the technology platform - problems are invariably people rather than application system issues but the project will be tarnished unfairly if it is named the same as any technology component being implemented.

Progressive implementation and continuous improvement

Another week - another iPOS for SunSystems eProcurement client management workshop. This organisation really has its head screwed on:
- senior management level (director) project sponsor
- believes that progressive implementation is the pragmatic way to improve the business
- a focus on continuous improvement "and in our business that improvement means iPOS" (this is an enterprise whose demands for cost control and quality service delivery far outweigh the revenue generation function).

So what are they focussing on improving this year?

Approx 10,000 of their supplier invoices last year - over 30% of their purchasing spend - were generated before the purchase order - oops, plenty of maverick spending there but now at least they have all purchasing going through the one channel. With a single source of truth in the data they now have the opportunity to report and reflect on their users' buying habits and supplier delivery patterns.

Big improvements will be made in contract adherence when the culture of "PO before invoice" for the workforce and "no PO-no payment" for their suppliers becomes business as usual.

Great opportunities for administrative cost reduction and efficiencies in supplier invoice processing when they can be loaded from PO rather than punched in like last year.

Supplier rationalisation is another likelyhood, and while we're at it let's punch-out to the online catalogs of major suppliers and a preferred buying hub, hence outsourcing the administratively demanding catalog management to the suppliers. And maybe some new contract negotiation based on actual volumes.

Good days ahead for this client and a great opportunity for all stakeholders as some potential merger style activity is on the radar.

Starting the BPM journey (2)

So you have chosen the correct path for your business vis-a-vis drive down admin costs or attack high value/risk operations and for good or for bad you now need to "do something".

Common and worthwhile advice is to map out the process "as is" - this means draw out the logical steps and decision points of the process as it currently exists and you understand it today. Invariably this means setting up workshops with the various stakeholders, recording their comments and then extrapolating your notes into a pictorial representation of actions, responsibilities and directional flows (perhaps prepared in Microsoft Visio or - shudder - PowerPoint. There are some very powerful tools to help here - more on this later).

So now you think you know what the process looks like and you may be able to identify some of the problems/challenges/breakdowns/fractures/bottle necks etc.

Next step for most if not all protagonists is to map out the process as you would like it "to be". Look to iron out the wrinkles, reduce the number of handovers, drive down human errors and remove the areas that cause iterative queries, rework and indecision. Especially look for where things get stuck in the lifecycle and concentrate on driving down time wasted whilst nothing happens (time lag).

Now what? Workshop it - take it into the boardroom and expose it to the rigour of team thought. Allow the stakeholders an opportunity to assess and critique your thoughts and plans and give you guidance on improvements and problems. Take them seriously - you will get a better outcome. This is a good change management tactic too - people involved in the design of new ways, and educated early on why and what any changes will be, are invariably more willing and supportive of the change when it comes.

Rework the "to be" and re-workshop it. When all done start asking the stakeholders to commit to some service levels around the handover points from one org-chart responsibility to the next (or be more radical). If you go on the premise that "the customer deserves a quality experience" at each point (starting with the real end-customer and working back through the supply chain) then at each handover point you will be able to identify a factor that directly impacts on the quality experience of the customer-end of each handover. A sales manager may say "my team will commit to placing correct orders on service delivery 100% of the time". That's a good start, now work back from there. (You will need to measure these commitments so keep them tangible and objective).

Looking good - you now have a documented, commonly understood, consultatively honed and improved process ready to be implemented with service level agreements for quality at each responsibility point in the process lifecycle.

Whew, take a break, you deserve it!

Starting the BPM journey (1)

A noisy and opinionated little group of us were "workshopping" (shooting the breeze) the perennial problem for most companies which is where to start the BPM journey. Peeling away the layers of enthusiasm and passion and looking at the hard cold facts we have seen around the traps there seems to be two schools of thought:

(1) under the radar, low cost-low value, administration/HR style processes
(2) pick a strategic process involved in delivering high cost services to an important client

The first option takes a path of least resistance approach and builds an inoffensive, but perhaps undervalued, reputation for the project which may cause it to stumble when the real meaty challenges are faced.

The second option takes a braver stance in the business and needs a visionary to see it through however the final outcome has much greater potential.

Comparing two professional services firms we know - one desired the benefits around automating their HR and admin processes vis-a-vis employee benefits and the like - the other was dismissive of that and was far more driven towards a commoditised process to build a new line of revenue by packaging existing practices. Horses for courses.

Based on our watercooler conversation it all came down to the business imperative and the project champion - are you looking to drive down basic costs and increase consistency, predictability and visibility or looking for strategic opportunities for revenue generation and high value transaction commoditisation?

Does your company listen to you?

It is a rare beast indeed that empowers people throughout an organisation to truly initiate changes to "business as usual" in the pursuit of efficiency and productivity. Many talk the talk but how many really walk the walk?

The impetus for significant change struggles to bubble up from within. It depends on senior management for the oxygen and nutrients necessary to survive. This is the reality of the business world we live in and good sales people cut to the chase in their qualification very quickly - am I dealing with a decision maker and is there a budget for this project - if the answer is not "yes" to both of these questions then they know there is a challenge to success lying ahead.

This pragmatism relates directly to the issue of process change and change management within an organisation. No matter how well intentioned and passionate a middle manager may be about their visions for efficiency gains and improvement - if there isn't a senior manager sponsor on board (and at least a little bit of budget) it is going to go nowhere. The passion and vigour will be beaten out of the provocateur and over time they will fade to beige.

So how do you get a senior manager sponsor? You need to ensure that you are focusing on what keeps them up at night - and remember, what keeps you awake at night may not be the same thing so you may need to extrapolate your tactical worry up to their strategic worry. You will most likely need to put a business case in place. You might need to build a return on investment model.

If these are new concepts to you then you probably need a coach or mentor to help you through the journey. Beware however of the coach dogmatically telling you what to actually change, only you have the intimate exposure to what the problem is, however a coach can provide great thought processes, strategies, comparisons and ideas to look for innovative ways of attacking things.

New Account Opening (NAO)

It appears that Phil Ayres and I stumbled across each other from two different sides of the world at pretty much the same time. While I was reading his excellent blog on New Account Opening last night he appears to have been responding to one of my posts on risk removal - gotta love that Internet.

Phil's background and experience are perhaps in a strata of business that we don't have much of a footprint in and the challenges of efficiently and effectively managing NAO in a mid tier organisations are admittedly less complex and far less volume driven than the banking industry - but just as important and challenging for the mid tier enterprise. In the pursuit of bringing process improvements into the SunSystems arena we have perhaps developed what has been coined by Gartner a Composite Process Solution (CPS)

WARNING - unashamedly commercial plug from this point on:

Workflow for SunSystems from Professional Advantage is a "boxed set" of predefined, non-transactional process templates within a BPMS that allows SunSystems installations to automate the control of their master data management (MDM) or customer data integration (CDI). Boy there's a lot of three letter acronyms (TLA) in that - and they're all for real - I don't make this stuff up!

What all that actually means is ...... when you want to open a new account in SunSystems you initiate, direct, manage and complete the process through a browser based set of workflow rules and screens that control things like:

- who is allowed to request a new account be opened (in our business just sales department and management people)

- what initial information about the account is required before the request can be submitted (like division/business unit engaging with the client, client name, address, company registration (needs to be unique in our customer database and gets auto validated against the online government portal), primary contacts etc etc)

- what is the first step of review and approval (in our business the Sales Manager confirms we are willing to sell this product and service combination at this price point etc).

- what is the next step of data gathering, verification and approval - classically at the B2B trading level we want to check trading references (force a minimum of three perhaps?), credit agency reports (rating must be greater than "orange" perhaps?) etc

- then what information do we need to issue the client in terms of bank details for electronic payment, contact details for query resolution etc for their financial systems (afterall if we are setting them up as a client they are setting us up as a supplier). This can be sent as an email or as a link to a web page for them to review and complete as required.

- penultimately a senior fincancial manager reviews all the steps to date and approves the work to date

- then a client, chart of account and contact record are automatically created in the target SunSystems database (optionally supported by the creation of equivalent records in other line of business applications - CRM, sales invoicing, distribution etc etc) - nobody logs into SunSystems to do all that, it just happens automatically with all the data collated during the approval process, and hey, no keyboard errors either.

- and finally an email to the original sales executive confirming creation of the new account with the relevant reference code if required and the whole lot gets archived away

Throughout the timeline there are activity and bottleneck reports available and extensive reporting options for auditing and compliance management (hello SOX, Clerp 9, Basel 2 et al)

In the real world it's not just new clients of course, so we have the same for suppliers, assets, account and transaction analysis codes (A codes and T codes in Sun-speak). In the background we have stacked up a few HR processes as well including leave management, employee onboarding, travel request and advances management, employee expenses and the like.

These templates come out of the box in Workflow for SunSystems and seamlessly integrate to SunSystems 4 and 5 installations on the MS SQL and Oracle database platforms. They can be implemented "as is" or modified slightly or substantially to better fit the company policies and procedures. I would be the first to acknowledge that this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to risky processes in a business. However the added benefit of Workflow for SunSystems being contained in a BPMS is that other processes identified in the organisation can be mapped and automated over time within the one common framework (even if they have nothing whatsoever to do with SunSystems itself).

Phil Ayres challenged me to be able to "show it in action" with "an implementation of less than 30 days" - we can install in an afternoon! I can "show and tell" by Webex - gotta love that Internet.

UPDATE - 16 June 2006: Access to Workflow for SunSystems doesn't have to be restricted to within the corporate firewall - being browser based it can easily be published to customers, suppliers, the supply chain in general - to enable people to initiate and be involved in processes specific to them. For example, we can allow suppliers to enter their own invoice online (forcing a valid PO number to be entered if required), attach a document image as support and submit for processing by accounts payable. How's that for a way to drive down those administration costs? Just one of many that can be addressed with Workflow for SunSystems.

Entering the SOA and BPM debate

Plenty of blogs and mainstream press these days are focussing on SOA (service orientated architecture) and in the business process management world there is lots of debate about are SOA and BPM the same thing? Is one a subset of the other? How do they interplay?

I'm a simple old soul really and perhaps not sufficiently learned about the various, and assuredly complex, layers in all of this however as I see it:

SOA serves the IT community and BPM serves the business community.

My thoughts are guided more along the lines of where the budget holder and project sponsor is than affinity to any church on this.

If the dollars and sense are in the IT division then there is a reasonable likelyhood that SOA will get the nod - it comes with lots of techno-speak that sufficiently disguises it as a complex and IT-driven dark art.

If the champions are from the business then BPM may be more involved in the outcome as the push comes from the outside in and the business will most likely be focussed on costly customer-driven interactions and processes and looking for tangible ways to salve those pains.

If there are drivers at both ends then I think there is a comfortable place in the middle where they intersect with a common goal of driving efficiencies and improvements in service delivery for all parties.

Do you manage risks or remove them?

Lots of meetings and conversations I am having at the moment seem to have a "risk management" component to them - everyone is looking for ways of managing the risks they have in their business. But hang on - if you are into risk management then you go looking for risks to manage - why not be into risk removal? Go looking for the risks and then identify how to remove the scale or nature of the risk rather than "manage" it through continuity/crisis planning.

Yet again Business Process Management comes to the fore in this - so many risks described to us invariably boil down to people or process problems - and rarely anything to do with the individual person - more often it is how the processes or procedures are allowing the person to fail in some way.

Plenty of risk always revolves around where people interact with eachother or a business management system - particularly those grey fuzzy areas of inter-departmental responsibility transfer. Opportunities for delay, ambiguity, misunderstanding, keyboard error etc abound. The classic time and cost driven risks. A Business Process Management Suite gives you a great framework for building rule sets and process steps around the people-to-people/system activity flow thereby removing a huge percentage of those potential risks.

Risk management struggles to add tangible value to the business process - risk removal catapults you into a new place entirely.

eProcurement and the dreaded catalogue management

Catalogue management is one of the trials and tribulations of implementing an eProcurement system. There are many reasons why managed catalogues make absolute sense and yet so many businesses fight it off during process design and system implementation workshops - "it's too hard - we won't be able to maintain it - our suppliers can't give us their catalogs electronically" etc etc.

The following is an excellent article on this topic by Debbie Wilson in Cool Tools for Purchasing.

http://www.purchasingautomation.com/articles/articles173.shtml

I particularly liked the section "Maximizing Catalog-Based System Performance" - as always it's all about people and their behaviour rather than systems and their operation. I smiled broadly when I read this bit.

The final line is a cracker - "if someone tells you that in order to successfully implement eProcurement you must normalize your data, offer requisitioners millions of items to choose from, and insist on certain formats from your catalog suppliers, don’t believe a word of it."

It doesn't have to be hard and it doesn't have to be every item on day one (or ever). It's all about mindset - look for the benefits to your business, pick the targets appropriately, keep it simple and remember the 80/20 rule - probably 80% of your spend is with 20% of your suppliers - focus accordingly and turn the heat up in your negotiations.

However let's not forget about online/web catalogues that a supplier maintains themselves. This can be an excellent way to outsource the responsibility of catalogue management to the supplier - "but how does that help me?" you may ask. With a sophisticated eProcurement solution (like iPOS for SunSystems) you can optionally punch-out to online catalogues and allow users to select items for their shopping basket as normal. The "check out" function on the website actually returns the item list back to your internal/buy side system for processing through the normal budget control and delegated approval rules.

In my experience this is most applicable for the classic low value - high volume suppliers such as office supplies etc where once a contract is in place you want the end-user to be able to select and purchase items with the least amount of fuss and effort. There may be "millions of items" for people to choose from but someone else is doing the hard work of managing them.

Punch-out is also the best way to interact perhaps with government or commercial buying hubs where multiple supplier catalogues may be aggregated. The challenge in leveraging these online marketplaces is the lack of real-time integration to the backend financial management system and the ability to overrun budget and approval controls through poor data integrity.

Punch-out comes with some downsides however:
- You rely on the supplier to maintain the currency of the catalogue and also to accurately apply the service levels of your contract.
- It may not be possible for the supplier to build restricted views of their catalogue for different user profiles in your business - it may be a one-size-fits-all approach.
- They may have more detailed views of your buying habits and trends than you do when it comes to contract negotiation.
- There could even be the ability for "push selling" in their catalogue management that leads people to buy upgrades or additional items or volumes based on the choices they make for their shopping basket.

In reality many organisations may decide to live with a combination approach to their purchasing procedures, internal catalogues for critical business purchases and strategic suppliers, online catalogues for "consumables" and free-form item description for those exceptions that invariably exist (controlled by increased levels of supplier selection, review and approval).

The sensible and reasonable wish of the business is for all options to be managed within a common, process-driven purchasing channel that delivers aggregated spend control and reporting with single source of truth in the financial data.

What's the asset number for that process?

Last week I was at the inaugural meeting of the Sydney chapter of BPMG. We had an interesting little get-together with an assortment of players in town. Thank you Bryan for an excellent venue and breakfast. During the general discussion Bridget B from Telstra asked a probing question - why don't processes get treated like assets?

I am two-finger-typing this out on a very uninspiring notebook PC - a modest machine and one of hundreds in the business of course. Flipping it over I spy a little yellow sticker with a barcode and 10 digit number. That's comforting - somebody knows about it and will care for it and come and replace it for me when it dies. But let's face it - it's a commodity that brings little or no value to the business other than what I grind through it each day. Indeed if I drove a stake through its little electronic heart tomorrow I would only have to walk 100 metres in any direction to be able to replace it with a swipe of my credit card. Not much of an asset really.

This afternoon a few of us were workshopping a case study of a fantastic FlowCentric BPMS implementation. Not something I was personally involved with but a great story. An insurance company that automated its stolen vehicle assessment and recovery processes with integration and involvement with complex backend systems and external stakeholders in customs, law enforcement, crash repairers etc etc. The return on investment of this project was only three weeks and the ongoing benefits to the business will I am sure be measured in hundreds of thousands if not millions for years to come.

Does that process have an asset number? I bet not.

What's the big deal - why make it an asset? Because assets get budget allocation and processes need the same level of respect. An effective business process has an intrinsic value to the business but to maintain that value it needs budget. Things change, things that were not possible before are possible in the future, new opportunities arise and legislation interferes in the daily drone with a monotonous regularity. So a process needs to have a budget allocation that ensures it will be improved, rejuvenated, redirected or replaced during its lifetime.

No budget - no love. Give your processes a little yellow asset sticker.

Is darkness your best practice?

Michael Rosemann told a very BPM orientated joke the other week - how many people does it take to change a light bulb?

None - if darkness is best practice.

Hmmm, OK, don't try it onstage at the comedy club but it has a certain drama hook.

Are there monsters in the dark corners of your business that keep you awake at night? Go out and find yourself a process doctor with a bag of light bulbs.

Business Process Owners touch other peoples stuff

This is a big conundrom in the process management world - when your business is structured in a vertical org-chart or traditional cost centre model and you start down the path of business process improvement just about everyone will tell you that you need Business Process Owners (BPO). They are champions responsible and accountable for the process end-to-end regardless of the edge-to-edge execution across divisional lines.

What that actually means is the BPO needs to be authorised to make changes to processes and tasks within the divisions that intersect with their process. In other words - they touch other people's stuff!

How do you reconcile that in senior management meetings?

I don't think there are any easy answers to this however I have heard of a few approaches to it, some very radical, others less so.

Extreme radical approach - transfer the IT budget out of the CIO role and into the CPO (Chief Process Officer). Budget only gets allocated on a process basis rather than a divisional basis. Of course you probably need to appoint a CPO first. This is for the maturity level 5 organisation perhaps.

Less radical - identify a set of KPIs for the Divisional Managers that are based around the performance of end-to-end process quality and link them to the annual performance bonuses.

Least radical - define service level agreements between the divisions and measure and monitor the process hand off activities and publish the measurements (effectively a leader board/shame list).

BPO's need the authority to make changes in order to improve a process even though the executors of the changes may not be in their reporting line. Indeed, an improvement to a specific process in one area may directly correlate to an increase in cost or responsibility within a division and come with little or no direct benefit. People in general loathe to have multiple bosses as the prioritisation of issues inevitably clash. Companies need to find ways of achieving the process improvements necessary without tearing the business to pieces.

I think in the end the relationship, and maturity, of the senior management team is pivotal in resolving this challenge. Finding common enterprise level goals and methods of measuring and reporting on these is perhaps a good place to start.

Bringing the adminaphobes into the fold

Remember our adminaphobic colleagues with the aversion to administrative tasks outside the areas of their important expertise? Well I have a few thoughts on how we can bring them back into the team.

An empowering strategy in addressing human conflict is the willingness to accept what the other person is saying as true for them in the moment. (Don't get me wrong - you don't have to agree with them, you just need to acknowledge that for them, what they are saying is true).

So take some time to listen to the argument and assess the situation from their point of view. Also, don't fall into the trap of looking for solutions within software systems from the get-go. Pretty much every problem can be solved within the people-process-product continuum (product in this case being software applications) however the people/process corners of the 3P trinity are always the best places to start in my opinion.

Perhaps the problem lies in change management. Does he understand the process? Does he understand the importance of the process? Does he understand his role in the process? Has he been trained in his role? Has he understood and absorbed the training or does he require additional support? Why has he not been able to adopt the expected behaviour as a norm? Is the completion of the process at odds in some way with the goals or KPI's of his job role or team?

It may just be that he is unsure, unconfident, concerned about making embarrassing mistakes, threatened by what the process means to his empire, or just plain missed the communications and education up front in the project.

Now, what about the process? Is it too complex? Can it be simplified? Are there conflicting elements or responsibilities. For very casual executors of the process is there too much collateral information? Or too ambiguous a data/job flow? Are there components of data coming from different sources that may be misunderstood, or overpowering or ambiguous for casual users?
Look into how that process can be improved, simplified and clarified. Other people will appreciate this effort as well.

Sometimes though he may have a valid point. Perhaps there is something about the "product" that is inefficient or ineffective for his role in the process. This then is a great opportunity for the business to improve its processes and enhance its relationship with important members of the workforce. Unfortunately most software applications struggle to adapt flexibly and agilely to very specific user requirements.

This is one of the many sweetspots for a business process management suite (BPMS). The wonderful thing about a BPMS such as FlowCentric is its inherent ability to define and control business processes outside of, and around the edges of, existing applications very cost effectively. It gives business the opportunity to hone areas of process that need to dovetail perfectly into human expectations whilst still leveraging the quite significant investment made in whatever the underlying application is.

A BPMS isn't generally concerned with the transaction end of a process, although this may be part of the outcomes, it is more generally successful in addressing the human element, and that of course is exactly where our adminaphobics sit.

The Business Process Management elevator pitch

Another week another conference - well my life isn't actually like that, it is just coincidence that I had two back to back - no more for months. This one was on B-Process-M and had moments of enlightenment in amongst the chaff. One of the moderators was Dr Michael Rosemann from QUT in Brisbane - someone I have met a few times now and each time I am more impressed than the last - he has a marvellous intellect, a sharp wit and a passion for his calling.

One of the questions thrown to a discussion panel from the floor (actually a colleague of mine, go Jonathan) was "what is the elevator pitch for BPM?". Great question and one that the panel really struggled with. You know the scenario, the CEO steps into the lift beside you and as the doors close he/she turns to you and and asks "so what do you do for our company?". You have 6 floors (20 seconds) to pitch your value and worth to the top dog.

"Well, eh, um, I, eh, you see, we, eh, I'm........" ding go the doors and out walks the only platinum coated sponsor in the business - impressive work Agent 99.

It's important to practice these things - you only get one shot!

The problem with our trusty seminar panel is that the elevator must have been in the Empire State Building - CEO's need sound bites - not monologues. And as I listened to the various suggestions I realised that I sound just like them. So over the last 24 hours I have put myself to the test - give me the snappy elevator pitch - and the follow-up line when the CEO presses the stop button and says "tell me more".

I started out with "BPM increases customer satisfaction and reduces costs" - hah! Everything ever pitched to a CEO "increases customer satisfaction and reduces costs" - got to do better than that.

"BPM reduces customer irritation and recovers margins lost to the business" - all right, that sounds pretty good.

His hand is reaching for the stop button, quick what's the follow up? "We identify the most common complaints our customers have about our service delivery and then we iron out the wrinkles in the processes that underpin those areas so that we get a quality result everytime. The reduction of administration and problem management releases profits back to the bottom line everytime."

Hey, not bad, give the man a cigar - can anyone do better? Let me have it.

June 1st - Hmmm, having slept on that I don't think I nailed it. Some tweaking required.

"BPM increases staff and customer [internal and external impact] satisfaction and recovers profits [better than margins] lost in the business".

Followed by:
"We search out [more proactive] the most common and serious [intent] complaints people [not just customers] have about our value chain [end to end] and streamline and automate [expend effort] the processes that underpin those areas to get a reliable, quality outcome. The resulting reduction of administration and irritation releases profits back to the bottom line everytime."

I think that's better again - any thoughts out there?

The presentation virgin

Another session in last week's Corporate Performance Management seminar was a case study by the Melbourne Cricket Club. A venerable Australian sporting institution that coincidently I am proud to call an iPOS eProcurement for SunSystems client. The speaker introduced himself as "a presentation virgin" being his first presentation to a body of this nature. He performed admirably, his talk was on topic, his presentation was well considered and some of his graphics were simple yet brilliantly representative of a point (something a lot of presenters could learn from). Well done Ivan.

However it got me wondering what sort of guidance and support the seminar organisers gave this "virgin" in the lead up to the day. I hope he wasn't left to work it out for himself - that would have been a little discourteous.

Having given a presentation or two myself, and having also been the driver of some in-house events, I recently published the following tips and tricks on our corporate portal. These may not work for everyone, indeed some presentation experts may consider them amateurish, however they have helped me build a fragile confidence over time in the black art of public speaking.

In the interest of sharing, here they are:

Preparation

• Use the correct PowerPoint template presentation. And a simple one too please- nothing too busy.
• If there is a keynote speaker, dove-tail some of your focus points to that topic and if you can talk on the fly, try to weave some points from that session into yours.
• Use pictures wherever possible.
• Read it over and over and remove every word that doesn't add clearly to your message.
• Shuffle points and slides around to get the best sequence.
• Don't use someone else's presentation unless you are very confident - build your own with trigger words that mean things to you.
• Develop a presentation model of “objective, benefit, feature”, e.g. “Driving down maverick purchasing [objective] will generate cost savings and reduce risk [benefit] – the delegated approval controls in iPOS eProcurement for SunSystems [feature] ensure only valid purchases are generated onto supplier orders.[objective achieved]”.
• There should be a re-focusing conclusion and a call to action for sales/next steps at the end.
• Workshop your presentation with your peers/the sales team/the seminar manager.
• Less is more – thin it out and stick to the core message. Averaging one slide every three minutes is a reasonable pace.
• Do a full dress rehearsal with the projector etc in front of an audience (the weekly team meeting perhaps).
• Backup your presentation on a USB key or similar.
• Practice your presentation at home in front of the mirror (I also use the ironing board!) – try out different phrases and word combinations to find what works well when spoken - very different from when being read - get confident in these phrases.
• If possible get some background on the interests of the attendees and relate information in your presentation appropriately.

On the day

• Get a good night’s sleep and get to the event early.
• Dress appropriately – suit & tie/business wear normally (better to be a little over than under dressed).
• Setup and test any hardware before people arrive especially including microphones/speakers.
• Bring plenty of business cards.
• Introduce yourself to some of the attendees as they arrive and engage in conversation – ask them what they are looking for from the seminar – later try to relate that in your presentation – “Sally from company XYZ was telling me over coffee that ….” – and please don’t pick on poor Sally every time.
• If you are being introduced to the floor by someone give them the details of how you would like that to happen i.e. “Here is John, he works in the basement” leaves a completely different impression to “Today John will talk to us about xyz. John has worked with Acme Company for 4 years and his current role is as such-and-such with prime responsibility for so-and so. John brings great passion to his topic today and will be available afterwards for further discussion”.
• If using a microphone, please don’t tap it, discreetly ensure it is switched on and start talking. Talk in only a slightly louder voice than normal, microphones do not amplify your voice clearly if it is not already somewhat amplified to start with. Do not shout.
• Start by introducing yourself and thank the attendees for their time.
• If you can involve some sort of personal experience with the topic you are speaking to, it can warm up the audience very well, particularly if they can relate to it themselves – keep it short though, no life stories.
• Don’t read every point on the slides – they can do that themselves – talk to the focus point. Telling stories with a relevant point can be very effective.
• Stop pacing around like a caged lion (I used to be an Olympic class pacer - very hard to stop).
• A stage actor gave me a tip to get into a slightly uncomfortable standing position pushing your toes into the front of your shoes, it may feel uncomfortable but it actually looks good from the audience.
• Use your hands for restrained emphasis, don't wave them around and don't shove them into your pockets gentlemen and fiddle with your keys.
• Make eye contact with people and smile.
• Talk slower.
• If a question threatens to derail the presentation, suggest that it can be addressed after the seminar one-on-one.
• If someone throws up a horrer story about your company or product/service try not to be drawn into a battle. Perhaps you could express amazement and disappointment that such an event has happened to them and welcome their feedback directly after the seminar. This is a rare occurance but can happen - think disgruntled shareholders.
• Encourage and thank people for filling out the feedback forms at the end of the session.

Now, that's not too much to remember is it? All you have to do after this is actually speak about the topic - easy - that will be your passion.

20 June 2006 - having just given another presentation last week there are two very important extra points:

• Urge all attendees to fill out the feedback form ther and then
• Take the feedback as constructive suggestion on how you can improve (rather than personal and hurtful abuse!)

Adminaphobic knowledge workers

Today I am coining a new phrase - remember, you read it here first - the "Adminaphobic knowledge worker". The what? The well paid, over-ego'd, middle/senior ranking colleague who believes he (let's face it, rarely a she) is too important/busy/needed elsewhere to be bothered with the nuisance of administrative tasks such as purchase requisitioning, timesheets, incident reporting, leave requests etc etc etc. (Read this for an excellent explanation of the "knowledge worker" as opposed to the adminaphobe).

Know anyone like that in your patch?

The challenge for business management is the sickening reality that sometimes these guys are actually right - they may well be a little too important to us in some way, we may be somewhat over exposed, they could well be the "bus man" (the one person you don't want run over by that proverbial bus). Unfortunately they are also frequently arrogantly aware of this and willing to flaunt and abuse their position of power. So what can we do - because we really do want these guys to perform their admin.

An aside but an interesting and relevant little anecdote and a flash back to the malevolence of a previous ORA post. One of our iPOS eProcurement for SunSystems clients was complaining that "the system doesn't work for us". Now, I would say that pretty much everytime I have heard something like that the problem boils down to the fact that their business processes or people are the cause of the problem - not the "system" (and that is not a proud boast on our software, I would say it is a fairly safe general comment about most commercial, mature software applications). Sure enough, the problem was that requisitions for inappropriate spend were being "approved by the system incorrectly". After a little forensic analysis it actually turned out that one of their adminaphobes had handed over his password and responsibility to a group admin assistant to approve his requisitions (I'm too busy for that) and as she had no basis for deciding what was right and wrong she was merrily approving everything that came his way on his behalf.

So how would I approach the conundrum of our adminaphobic friends?

To be continued ..... (don't you hate that).

BPM is BPM

I spent 2 days of last week at a conference, the major focus of which was Corporate Performance Management (CPM) - quite worthwhile, mildly enlightening, excellent hospitality. One of the presenters voiced a commonly held view - Enterprise Performance Management, Corporate Performance Management and Business Performance Management are one and the same thing. I concur.

And on the basis that the driver is "performance" then the classifications of Enterprise and Corporate add little more than a sense of scale rather than difference in purpose. Therefore the performance management equation is EPM = CPM = BPM.

But what of the other BPM? Business PROCESS Management. My BPM.

Well I believe that is one and the same thing as well.

So BPM = BPM. Hmmm, that's a tricky equation to prove.

Process Management is all about the inputs - Performance Management is all about the outputs. It is the same spectrum just viewed from different ends.

Another presenter made a very valid point - if you are not interested in, and driven by, change, then Performance Management is pointless. Performance Management when broken down into its component parts - as done elaborately by one presenter - focusses greatly on the identification, measurement, reporting and analysis of business information from disparate and frequently unconnected sources.

That information is also predicated by its very nature on what has gone before - you can't measure what hasn't happened. Performance Management gives excellent opportunity to identify trends and patterns and do that holy grail "what if" analysis. However there is little point investing the time, effort and cost in the Performance end of the spectrum if you have no intention of embracing change at the Process end.

It is afterall the Process end that incubates all that lovely measurement information in the first place. So making process improvements guided by historical performance starts to make a lot of sense. Therefore BPM = BPM.

True customer service

Much to the chagrin of my home life I was in London for 10 days in February and as a concession to my absence I though I would make a good impression by sending some surprise flowers on Valentines day. The joys on online commerce I thought as I selected a florist website, selected a bunch, filled in the details - and when I hit submit .... horror of horrers - the ultimate draed of the web-shop - a system crsh. So now what? Do I order again and hope they don't send two bunches? Do I let it be and hope they send a bunch? Hope is not a strategy.

In my interest to spend money locally I had cunningly selected a florist near my home in Sydney. It was 7.30am on Valentines Day - they must be up and at 'em. I phoned through and a very pleasant woman apologised profusely, assured me the order had not been placed and took all the details very efficiently over the phone.

What a result - a stunning bunch of flowers arrived, far more impressive than the modest arrangement I had chosen online, with a little side gift of heart shaped chocolates thrown in. Commendable care and unrequested compensation for my poor user experience with the website. Went down a treat on the home front as well

Now that is customer service. Need some flowers? Use the Crows Nest Florist - but don't order online!

What is a business process?

Everything in life is a process. Brushing your teeth is a process – a process that when done well results in rewards from the tooth fairy – and when done poorly ends up in tears at the dentist (can you tell I have got kids?).

A business process is any one of the day-to-day jobs that you have to do from 9 to 5. It may be the mundane business equivalent of teeth brushing or the enthusiastic reporting of the increase in annual profits, but either way, it is a business process. Many business processes are effectively managed within the confines of your software applications, company finances, customer service records, purchases and sales – all transaction based processes that you probably have a good handle on. What keeps you awake at night usually concerns the things that fall through the cracks and invariably those things are people dependant and exposed to the vagaries of human error.

Business Process Management is the definition, honing, documenting and automating of common business processes with special attention to those involving interpersonal communication and responsibility transfer. Another, probably more familiar, name for this is workflow.

There are two initial areas of importance in workflow – the concept of “end-to-end vs edge-to edge”, and the “process owner”.

Edge-to-edge usually replicates the responsibility of the org chart – step 1 is done by department X and then step 2 is done by department Y. Ownership and responsibility get handed over (hopefully) from department to department as the job progresses.

End-to-end is about addressing a process from inception to completion regardless of divisional or org. chart delineations and responsibilities. A process owner owns a process “end-to-end” and is the individual charged with ensuring the process starts, progresses and completes in an effective and efficient manner.

The business process management journey frequently starts in assessing these two areas in relation to the primary pain points in the business and devising ways of improving the inputs to achieve consistent, best quality outputs.
So when you look into the mouth of your business tonight which are the teeth that will earn money from the tooth fairy and which will have you in tears at the dentist?

ORA again

Ownership, responsibility and accountability - my favourite topic again. One of the various email newsletters I get is from Just Sell which is a sales practice forum. Their latest posting is called "A letter to Garcia" and reprints a missive from Elbert Hubbard in 1899 - the ORA concept brilliantly put all those years ago. Check it out for yourselves.

Why is business process management (BPM) a big deal ...

…and why should small and medium companies be looking at this practice? The answer is simple – dollars, dollars, dollars. Over the last decade we have seen the wax and wane of the big IT project throughout the enterprise – ERP, CRM, intranet, ecommerce etc. Time and again these projects failed to meet expectations, ran over budget, implementations rolled on endlessly and no-one talked ROI at the end of the day the way they did at the start. I think most would agree that the one big technological innovation that has boomed for everyone (indeed now becoming a victim of its own success) is email – and it crept up on us bit by bit to a point where now perhaps we can’t function without it. Email has automated the business process of interpersonal communications.

The problem with email from a procedural viewpoint is it is unstructured, fluid, uncontained and virtually unauditable. Let’s face it, when you want to get someone to do something in this day and age, even though they are only down the corridor, you bash out a quick email and hit the send button. Unfortunately the intent or expectation of your message is not always correctly digested or enacted by the recipient.

A request along the lines of “please do a credit check on A.N. Company” may be merrily replied to with a “done” but, have the tasks that were required and expected by the sender been performed by the recipient? Did all three credit checks with existing suppliers of longer than 3 years, a trading history scorecard from a credit reference agency, and a verification of the company registration number all get “done” with the results recorded in the files – or not? That is the mystery and the danger of email. And remember – this is the realm of email because few of the mid-tier financial or ERP systems incorporate a workflow or automation framework outside of the transactional lifecycle. Adding a new debtor to the ERP system generally starts at the data capture screen [you know the drill, New record, Code = , Name = , Address = ……..] – but hang on – what about all those prior steps involved in capturing all the data and assessing and approving the debtor for trading purposes in the first place? Those business processes fall through the cracks of your average FMS/ERP because they are about communication – not transaction.

Business process management is the structured execution of tasks based on pre-defined policies and procedures. So when the credit check is performed, the person engaged must follow through the approved set of tasks and actions and record the results as they go before being able to reply “done”. If they don’t do it and record that they have done it, then they can’t set it “done”. The process may start and end with an email as before but the correct steps were taken in between – every time. Simple, consistent, foolproof and money-saving – every time.

In every company across the planet there are myriad processes demanding structure when you think about how to improve and control your business communications and operations. Drive down costs, drive down risks, drive down errors – dollars, dollars, dollars.

Environmental sustainability is our responsibility

I am writing this on a plane to London – 24 hours of enforced inactivity – plenty of thinking time. I have a jammed week of meetings with our UK resellers ahead and this may be one of the only times I get for a rant.

Before I left I checked the level in our water tank. We have a modest 3000 litre tank in the back garden fed by the runoff from the main living area roof. It is connected to a smart little pump system that feeds the water to the toilets and the washing machine. If the tank runs low a sensor kicks in a “Rainbank” device that diverts the feed from the mains water instead. Cool, hey? The problem with Sydney is rain is infrequent but torrential – it pours down for a few days and the tank fills up rapidly – then it doesn’t rain for weeks on end. Four weeks ago the tank was full to the brim, this morning there was about 10 days left before the sensor would be exposed. That’s important to me at the moment because the sensor is faulty and I want to replace it when the tank empties out but must make sure not to run the pump dry. That’s one of the little things we do around our place for environmental sustainability and it should pay itself off in 15 years unless the cost of water skyrockets! I would love to go the solar energy way and feed kilowatts back into the grid but the cost is mind blowing – and in a country like Australia it should be a no-brainer.

On the plane I have just read a newspaper article giving dire warnings of the world’s impending doom as the populations of India and China grow their economies at such an exponential rate that their demand for the world’s resources increases in a generation at the rate that the western world saw over hundreds of years.

On the radio in the taxi on the way to the airport I heard some of the federal government “question time” – generally boring as and mindless with the Dorothy Dixer rubbish that they set up for themselves – that woman has a lot to answer for (whoever she was). One of them was pounding on about the exciting events that took place in January when 6 of the countries that refused to sign the Kyoto Convention on greenhouse gas control and reduction – Australia shamefully being one of them, others I think being China, India, Korea, USA and Japan (known jointly as “AP6”) – got together to chinwag about what could be done to lessen the destruction of the world as we know it.

Earlier, at the school bus stop, I was talking to another school dad who is working with a company that is aggregating a bunch of small rural manufacturing and distribution companies across the country to build a coast to coast backyard environmental supplies chain – water tanks, grey water systems, sewage management, solar power devices etc – great idea.

Last weekend I was shopping for some big chunks of foam rubber seating (riveting I know but the window seat demands cushions) and the extremely helpful and knowledgeable shop owner said “buy now because in February the prices are rising 15%”. Apparently foam rubber has a critical component called TPD – or maybe TDP? –and this is of course a by-product of oil and only made by three companies worldwide (Dupont being one) and (take a breath here!) China’s demand for this substance is such that the supplies for the rest of the world have been frozen at current levels and all increased capacity is going to China (and presumably India when they work out how obviously precious it is). There must be a huge demand for window seat cushions in these developing countries.

In November 2005 I was at a breakfast seminar where the keynote speaker was Jack Knight of Frank, Knight, Sinclair fame – a helluva nice guy it seems. He was saying that Shanghai has more multi-story construction cranes in operation at the moment than the rest of the world put together.

The New South Wales government has been threatening to build a water desalination plant to lessen the threat of massive water shortages for Sydney in the coming decades – then magically this week they announced the discovery of a new aquifer in the Sydney basin that will “never run out” – that sounds like politico talk to me.

Where am I going with this? – I seem to be rambling – but hey, that’s the beauty of blogging. There just seems to be a constant noise these days about our voracious consumption of the planet we stand on. What sort of a world are we chewing up and spitting out for our kids? Will anything be left for my far off grand children? We each of us need to be doing more to maintain the resources we have.

Innovation and invention in new technologies to lessen our dependence on oil and coal and increase the output and affordability of renewable resources should be given greater incentives and broader support. We all need to look at our own consumption patterns for ways off reducing waste and our drain on natural resources.

Business Process Owners

Another of my current personal responsibilites is the commercial ownership of our Business Process Management (BPM) solution FlowCentric. The whole concept and practice of BPM is fairly new and evolving within the small to mid-tier enterprise and is frequently referred to as workflow (the big boys have been playing here for years but we have a great, affordable solution for the more cost sensitive organisation) .

One of the regular conceptual challenges is that of a business process owner - being someone who owns and is accountable and responsible (sound familiar) for the complete lifecycle of a process within the company. The reality is that many - if not most - people cannot get their heads around this idea. The general response is that "I own it from here to there, then Fred owns it to there and then Mary owns it and then ..." - in other words edge-to-edge rather than end-to end responsibility - no-one is measured on a lifecycle KPI.

The result of this blinkered view into process execution is that it can be challenging to achieve quantifiable efficiencies and improvements end-to-end unless each edge-to-edge champion gets a bite of the benefit cherry. Without a single, butt-kicking, head-on-the-block, KPI-driven, process-owner things are always going to fall through the cracks and get lost in the grey areas of handover.

The following snip from www.bpminstitute.org gives a nice definition to business process owner.

"The notion of business process owners was introduced by Michael Hammer in the 1990’s as part of the Reengineering discipline, but integration of this notion into business practice has been limited. A process owner, as stated in the iSix Sigma Dictionary, is the one "accountable for sustaining the gain and identifying future improvement opportunities on the process." These folks become your cross-functional link across all facets of the end-to-end process. They are the ones who ensure that improvements in one segment of a process don’t negatively impact downstream process segments. Identifying executives who will own the measures, improvements and success of each business process is critical to the implementation and on-going success of your process management efforts."

Ownership, responsibility and accountability (ORA)

This is a subject close to my heart and something I expect I will bang on about from time to time. One of my personal responsibilities is the commercial development and distribution of an eprocurement solution called iPOS for SunSystems. Some time ago I was asked to attend a meeting with a client that was complaining that their purchasing policies weren't beeing adhered to by the system.

As a colleague and I probed deeper into the problem it became obvious that the issue was not system related (these things rarely are) but people and culture related. A number of senior staff had taken the "don't you know how important I am" approach to business environment change - in fact they had avoided it all together by getting their secretarial or personal assistants to perform the online approval function for purchase requisitions. These assistants were generally not capable of making the decisions about what was and wasn't appropriate for team members to purchase and hence just approved everything that popped up in the email inbox. The results spoke for themselves.

There are of course a number of technical solutions to this situation that would force the correct person to have to login to the system and perform the approval process (digital signatures, dongles, two factor authentication etc etc) however that is not the point.

ORA means that an individual owns a task to the point where it can be handed over to another (or completed) and performs the task in a responsible way - surprisingly enough in this case that does not include giving your password to someone else and then blaming them (and the computer system) when they do your job incorrectly.

In another organisation I came across the dark side of ORA - I'll come back to that another time.

Customer service at my ISP

Negligent customer service really annoys me and unfortunately I seem to be coming across it a lot at the moment - maybe its me, not "them". My latest ISP is a support quicksand, I logged an online trouble ticket on 24th Jan and never heard from them again. I followed it up with a phone call today and the tech phone support desk announces they don't have access to the trouble ticket system - "that is another department" - but he takes my ticket number down anyway! My problem was resolved over the phone but I couldn't be transferred to anyone of meaningful responsibility to voice my opinions on my customer service experience. My dissatisfaction in their support service would be passed on to the "relevant people" by my trusty new friend on the phone.

So, I learn't a few things today:

1) My ISP tech support doesn't have access to its own tech support systems.
2) They also don't appear to have any structured way of managing complaints.
3) The individual person involved didn't seem to care about me or indeed that his life would be easier if there was a complaints process he could follow.

Taking into account the fact that I didn't sign up with this ISP - I was sold with a bunch of other customers by an ISP I had been with for over 10 years - I will be shopping around for a new ISP - that was a bad investment for the purchaser - no recurring revenue from me - I wonder how many others they have stuffed around and lost. With the easy availability of non ISP email addresses like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail etc - there is no need to be worried about the ISP email address being a personal asset - it can be changed at the drop of a hat.

This rant is about customer service - but really the issue is about poor or non-existent business processes. Efficiency and effectiveness are what all companies should be striving for. Get good and clean about what you do - particularly around any customer facing area - happy customers spend their money and come back for more. It is that simple.