Background
A large food manufacturer, embarked on a Global Business Transformation Journey to streamline their operations and define a cohesive Target Operating Model. With a diverse range of business processes and multiple ERP (Enterprise resource planning) systems, the company faced challenges in standardization and harmonization. This case study explores how this company adopted BusinessOptix and partnered with a consulting firm to support their transformation journey and achieve their goals.
The four-year transformation journey aimed to harmonize core business capabilities across functions such as finance, procurement, supply chain, and commerce. The goal was to achieve a global way of working while leveraging SAP S/4Hana as the digital core.
Challenge
The company faced the challenge of documenting their internal business processes comprehensively. They had never undergone standardization or harmonization efforts before, given their organic growth and diverse ERP landscape. The lack of standardized processes made it difficult to track and manage changes effectively. The company sought to overcome this challenge by starting small and focusing on documenting their processes, establishing appropriate governance, and ensuring structured changes.
Solution
To address their challenges and support their transformation journey, the company chose BusinessOptix as their business transformation platform of choice. BusinessOptix would provide the ability to reuse existing processes and data allowing for faster implementation and increased efficiency.
The company’s Process Excellence team was brought on board to fulfill their role as the “keepers of the global way of working.” Comprehensive training provided by BusinessOptix played a crucial role in equipping the teams with proficiency in utilizing the BusinessOptix platform, thereby accelerating their understanding and facilitating a faster pace of the transformation journey.
Results
The adoption of BusinessOptix by their people and the consultants brought several successes to the company which included:
Documentation of Processes: BusinessOptix enabled the company to systematically document their internal business processes and standard operating procedures. They were able to establish a structured foundation for their target operating model, linking processes and data.
Reusability and Efficiency: The company gained significant efficiency in the implementation of BusinessOptix through the ability to reuse existing assets and streamline the process documentation. The visibility and efficiency gained enabled them to more easily focus on other aspects of their transformation.
Governance: The process owners and other business stakeholders were able to collaborate with the Process Excellence team and the consulting team within the BusinessOptix platform to review and approve the processes, with a full audit trail of changes made.
Future
The company anticipates exploring the implementation of process mining as they progress with their digital core, SAP S/4Hana and they envision integrating BusinessOptix with S/4Hana through event-driven triggers to capture processes executed in real-time. This will allow them to compare executed processes against defined golden processes and potentially incorporate process mining for compliance and improvement purposes in the future.
