Streamlining ERP Implementation:  Talking Rain's Success with BusinessOptix

Background

Talking Rain, a leading beverage company embarked on a journey to update its business processes and establish a culture of continuous improvement ahead of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system implementation. Recognizing the need to actively manage its processes ahead of the ERP transformation, it created a Continuous Improvement Center of Excellence and initiated a Business Process Management Program.

Challenge

With a process-first philosophy to support business goals and solve business problems, the Talking Rain Technology Department recognized the need to enhance its process modeling and management solutions, evolving beyond Visio and SharePoint to include new process intelligence capabilities. The goal was to ensure that all processes and requirements were in optimal condition as a prerequisite to the ERP software selection phase.

Talking Rain wanted the ability to accurately discuss goals and challenges within the context of precise end-to-end business processes during the selection and to easily share all current processes with the future System Integrator (SI) once the software implementation was kicked off. Achieving this level of preparation would avoid much of the traditionally high costs of an SI-led discovery phase. Executing this in-house also ensured processes were modeled in a format and style that Talking Rain key resources could understand and utilize swiftly for future change conversations. Using BusinessOptix as a centralized repository to collaboratively update, organize, store, and share processes with internal and external stakeholders during the internal discovery and selection phases proved much more effective than prior attempts utilizing Visio and SharePoint for process management.

Solution

Why BusinessOptix?

As part of the roadmap to support process management and continuous improvement, and to make implementing the new ERP as painless as possible, Talking Rain needed a process management and intelligence tool with native capabilities such as modeling, version and change control, simulation, and dashboards — features that go beyond the limitations of Visio and SharePoint. They needed a tool to set them on the right trajectory for future growth with a foundation in industry best practices. To mitigate the risk of implementing a new tool that might not work with their ERP system, Talking Rain chose BusinessOptix for its crucial features, such as tool flexibility and ease of collaboration.

Dave Horner, Vice President of Technology at Talking Rain, explained, "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.” This approach allowed the ERP selection team to avoid creating a standardized request for proposal for prospective ERP vendors. Instead, they had a comprehensive map of the company's technology landscape, highlighting business problems across critical business workflows (managed in BusinessOptix) that needed to be addressed.

Supporting across the ERP Implementation Lifecycle

Discovery Phase:

Using BusinessOptix to model current state processes and understand current pain points and associated requirements enabled Talking Rain ERP Program leaders to confidently develop program financial and non-financial benefit targets. This gave process owners and SI Partners confidence in entering the ERP design stage. All SI vendors considered for this project noted they had never seen an organization so prepared, and a global consulting partner engaged in the ERP selection process commented, “We have never seen an organization so well prepared for an initiative like this with clear and professional process and requirements documentation.”

The in-house documentation and management of ERP-enabled business processes using BusinessOptix eliminated the need for much of the traditional SI-led, time-consuming, and costly discovery phase. The SI was given access to review processes and develop an understanding of end-to-end business workflows, using this knowledge to make design suggestions that helped Talking Rain re-align with industry best practices in certain process areas. This helped Talking Rain improve its target operating model while avoiding carrying over unnecessary customization and bad practices from its old ERP.

Design and Build Phases:

As the SI partner presented future workflow and solution designs, Talking Rain reviewed against requirements and current state processes within BusinessOptix to identify potential issues and suggest changes to the suggested configuration and workflows. Early and confident alignment on configurations and workflows undoubtedly reduced the risk and cost associated with late discovery and correction of designs that didn’t meet business needs.

The SI developed and frequently adjusted system flows following their practices as key design decisions were made throughout the design and build phases. As these SI system flows were finalized, Talking Rain Business Analysts, supported by BusinessOptix Professional Services, uploaded the Visio-modeled system flows into BusinessOptix and then pulled them into the Talking Rain business processes for change modeling. Talking Rain’s team then used the transformation features in BusinessOptix to model the resulting changes to the business processes. This “change” state, showing both removed and added process and system steps, was workshopped to a final state with Process leads from the business. This was the first time business participants in a technology project had the opportunity to see and compare all three states - current, change, future - of a transformed process.

The transparency of the transformation modeling process gave Talking Rain’s Supply Chain and Finance process owners and leads a lot of confidence in their understanding of the full scope of the changes to each of their business processes. Project sponsors similarly were pleased with their functional leaders' clear understanding of how their processes and larger cross-functional business workflows, like Order to Cash, were transforming. This clear modeling of the transformation occurring across all impacted business processes enabled the Talking Rain project leads to swiftly revisit the anticipated value of the now clearly understood changes and reset the program value delivery roadmap confidently. Typically, ERP implementation sponsors are keen on setting clear value and benefits targets as a part of the Business Case process; however, without transformation modeling it can be difficult to find the information necessary to confidently adjust these rough order of magnitude early estimates (ROM). To avoid setting a path to disappointment, it is vital to re-estimate program value and benefits at strategic milestones such as the end of Design, and Transformation Modeling in BusinessOptix provides a clear picture of the changes coming to the business to support this cycle.

Testing and Training Phase:

As bugs were identified and fixes suggested during Unit Testing (UT), End-to-End Testing (E2E), System Integration Testing (SIT), and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) phases, Talking Rain continued to employ BusinessOptix to drive process change modeling and change control activities, ensuring changes to the Design-approved versions of business processes were captured and approved to ensure documentation within BusinessOptix remains accurate and up to date. This goal is to reach go-live with a clean process baseline from which to drive Process Management and continuous improvement activities.

Deployment, Go Live, and Support Post Go Live Phases:

Talking Rain plans to elevate its use of BusinessOptix beyond the intermediary repository level. This includes utilizing process change control and approval workflows and linking all standard operating procedures and work instructions to its processes for one-stop education. They will continue to use transformation modeling as processes change or need optimizing.

Results

BusinessOptix has enabled significant wins in alignment with Talking Rain’s ERP transformation:

• Supported a significant reduction in cost and time of the typical ERP Implementation discovery phase, saving 2-4 months out of the implementation.
• Prevented implementation scope creep and increased costs.
• Enabled effective change management, ensuring current to future processes were clearly modeled and understood by the business, providing a solid foundation to conduct further change management plans, build SOPs, develop training plans, deployment plans and plan adoption support.
• Ensured business needs were prioritized and minimized operational disruption with the ability to manage the process change backlog effectively