Background
Talking Rain, a leading beverage company, embarked on a journey to enhance its business processes and establish a culture of continuous improvement in alignment with an ERP transformation. Recognizing the need to actively manage their processes ahead of the ERP transformation, they created a Continuous Improvement Center of Excellence and initiated a Business Process Management Program.
Challenge
Talking Rain documented their processes in Visio and stored them separately in SharePoint which meant a lack of connectedness between systems, data, and people. This was posing a challenge for the business and its employees in accessibility, transparency, and navigation. The key challenges included:
- Repetitive problem-solving due to a lack of transparency and accessible data.
- Lack of active engagement from stakeholders in managing processes.
- Difficulty in educating employees about their roles and responsibilities.
- Inability to identify and drive continuous improvement with disjointed data.
Working with BusinessOptix to solve these challenges and begin building a digital twin of the business for continuous improvement, Talking Rain embarked on a phased transformation approach:
Phase 1 (Complete): Formalize and pilot process management standards and approach.
Phase 2 (Current): Create an educational Process Repository structured around the company Value Chain with basic continuous improvement features such as process versioning and pain point tracking.
Phase 3 (Future): Expand Process Management and Improvement program across the organization and enable advanced capabilities such as SOP management, process simulation, and enterprise process change control.
Solution
With the impending ERP transformation, Talking Rain saw the opportunity to organize its extensive process maps and drive a true process-centric approach as part of this transformation. Vice President of Technology at Talking Rain, Dave Horner, had used the BusinessOptix platform in a previous organization and could attest to the success the company found in using BusinessOptix for Business Process Management and Transformation. The Center of Excellence team at Talking Rain also found that when considering BusinessOptix, the flexibility of the tool to align with their business process methodology and the ease of collaboration were crucial factors.
"We used BusinessOptix to recognize where the inhibitors and opportunities were in the business processes before we even started to consider who would be the candidates for a new ERP” explained Horner. This approach allowed the ERP selection team to avoid creating a standardized request for proposal for the prospective ERP vendors but furnished them with a map of the company's technology landscape and helped surface business problems that needed to be addressed.
Results
In the initial phase 1, Talking Rain focused on building an Educational Repository and achieved a significant milestone by migrating 25-30% of its processes from Visio to BusinessOptix. This transformation was particularly impactful in the supply chain team, where the processes were visually managed through dashboards. Results include:
- Improved visibility into processes and their connectedness.
- Clear process ownership.
- Defined goals.
- Ability to highlight pain points.
Working with BusinessOptix to create a Digital Twin of its processes, Talking Rain successfully piloted its process management and continuous improvement model within its supply chain function, leading to the creation of a dedicated continuous improvement team in just six months. This success has sparked interest from other departments like finance and HR, demonstrating the scalability and adaptability of the approach.
Future
Using BusinessOptix's credibility and the success they’ve had up to this point with Phase 1 initiation, and with Phase 2 to build an educational repository now underway, Talking Rain's goal is to extend the process management program to other departments and foster a process-first attitude throughout the organization before embarking on Phase 3 to enable scenario testing and simulation.
“The BusinessOptix solution has brought credibility and visibility to our Business Process Management program, and having a fit-for-purpose tool is helping to motivate the business to dedicate the resources necessary to manage and improve processes. This is a huge step toward achieving a Culture of Continuous improvement across Talking Rain, and we are excited to continue the roll-out!”