Companies experience significant inefficiencies and they know it. Too often, the decision is made that it’s too difficult, too political, and too disruptive to operations to do more to manage how work gets done. Just as often, people won’t stop to capture process in flight because they believe it will change by the time it gets published. People learn to live with these problems and think, “It will always be that way.” We’re going to show you why that statement isn’t true.
Becoming Lean is the New Battle Strategy
Under pressure from global economic challenges, many countries are making huge defense cutbacks, including the UK and US. The Pentagon, for example, is facing a spending reduction of nearly $500 billion over a decade, with an additional $110 billion in automatic cuts to military. With this in mind, defense companies like BAE Systems must become leaner in everything they do. So that’s exactly what BAE System’s Finance Services did. As a part of a shared services initiative at the company, they documented over 280 processes and 330 work instructions to facilitate their Finance Transformation program.
Shared Services Play a Major Role
Every large business has services common to many departments across geographies, so it makes sense to integrate these services into a single entity, commonly known as a Shared Service Organization(SSO). In the early days, when SSOs were being formed, the main role was to increase operational efficiencies and reduce costs. These objectives still remain, but as SSOs have made ground as independent bodies, their focus has shifted to matters necessary for growth. Employees want easy-to-understand, rich process content delivered through a personalized, role-based portal that enables them to do the right thing at the right time; what one might call an “Intelligent Operations Manual.” This provides a better understanding of process by giving stakeholders a single source of the truth that aligns business with IT.
What Were BAE’s Results?
The result (which BAE calls “How2”) offers continuous improvement and service excellence as well as process and control governance for their customers. It’s helped them achieve significant savings in cost per finance transaction. With easy-to-use software, capturing and deploying best practices as a codified business processes is logical. By deploying a best of breed business process management platform for a single and integrated version of truth, you can detect, register, and unify processes.
“To bring How2 into BAE systems was extremely easy. It has actually been one of the easiest implementations I have seen for a while . . . we could trust it.”
– Guy Keough, P2P Manager.
For more information on BAE Systems, click here.
For more on how to integrate your systems to leverage Big Data, check out these Gartner reports:
Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Systematic SOA Infrastructure Projects
