The world around us is changing dramatically and this places increasingly higher demands on organizations to be efficient, agile, and process-driven. Unfortunately trying to become efficient has made ”inside-out” thinking the norm in the business world. Decision makers put enormous amounts of energy on scrutinizing each aspect of their organizations but have a tendency to forget the most important party – the customer.
Industries with strict legal requirements experience additional difficulties with becoming efficient and agile due to large volumes of forcing demands and industryspecific regulations. Many companies struggle with complex tracking of whether a legal requirement is fulfilled or not. Acando’s Effective Compliance offering, linked with the overall BPM offering, contains techniques which provides an overview of all the critical requirements, showing where these requirements link into your business processes.
Why Business Process Management?
One result of the automation of business processes using ERP systems has been a standardization of all processes into so called Best Practices. There is no argument that this is the most efficient way to handle support processes, however corporation will need to think of their strategic or edge processes in a different way and answer questions like; How will we build competitive advantage in a fast changing world with a moving customer target? How will we keep up with new regulations and safety requirements? The ability to change processes becomes the primary goal. The entire value chain needs to continuously improve and optimize using agile BPM (see illustration of the BPM lifecycle – source SAP). Today we can with current technology breakout desired processes from its standardized blocks, pick independent services, and construct company-specific edge processes, so called Composite Apps. A service-oriented architecture (SOA) requires documented process models. A visual depiction of the process will also strengthen and bring clarity to the communication between IT and Business around business requirements and how these are supported.
The Outside-In Approach
However, how do we know what part of the process to automate and how are all the manual steps supported? Acando advocates looking at the entire process and taking an Outside-In approach, incorporating the customer experience as the main theme in Process Improvement activities. The truth is that the customer’s focus is not on your internal operations. Their concerns are more personal: How can your product, service, or customer support staff help me address my concerns and meet my needs? We help companies become Outside-In, instead of “inside-out”, while ensuring effective compliance to regulatory requirements. In a workshop environment, Acando will guide your team through a set of steps which starts with identifying the ultimate customer of the process and what that customer’s successful outcome is. With a new way to look at processes and your customer´s interactions with the process, the workshop participant will see for themselves how and where to improve and reduce complexity. By identifying the SCOs of the process we will vocalize for all process participants what it is that your customer not only wants, but needs from each department the process touches.
Acando’s offering addresses not only process improvement opportunities but also ensure adherance to legal requirements. The purpose is to shift the focus from control checks to securing necessary traceability and effective compliance.
Effective Compliance
In the race for increased efficiency it is easy to loose control over the legal requirements the company needs to comply with. Traditional process improvement methods will not handle this task sufficiently. With Effective Compliance the client will receive control whether the requirements are addressed or not in the processes.
Approach
To obtain a better understanding of what requirements the company needs to comply with an analysis is made of all internal and external requirements. Typically these requirements are described in different procedures, guidelines and corporate directives. These documents can be a bit vague and give room for interpretation. To avoid different interpretations the requirements should be specific, measurable, accepted and unique. To provide a more holistic view of what requirements are specified by internal and external stakeholders they are compiled in a requirements specification. The specification provides an improved overview of exactly what requirement the business needs to comply with.
The requirements are transferred to a traceability matrix where it is pointed out in what processes they are addressed. The tracebility between requirements and processes provides not only control for the management team but also works as evidence for regulatory authorities that the company complies with current requirements.