Background
The University of Reading is a public research university in Reading, Berkshire, England. The University’s IT department decided to focus on improving documentation of processes both within the department and as part of four key project areas: HRMS, CRM, Project Portfolio Management and Legacy Web Apps. Before this, the only tool available within the University for process modeling was Visio and the goal was to find a more advanced solution that would streamline and improve the efficiency of process modeling.
Challenges
Before engaging with BusinessOptix, the University of Reading faced several key challenges as part of the improvement initiative:
- Lack of Proper Documentation: In many parts of the university, processes were either undocumented or poorly documented, making it difficult to conduct analysis and efficiently transfer tasks.
- Inconsistent Formats: Existing processes were documented in various formats and stored in different locations, making them difficult to access and use.
- Ineffective Tools: The existing tools, such as Visio, used to capture and store processes and associated documentation, were inadequate for meeting the evolving needs of the university, hindering continuous analysis and improvement of working practices.
Solution
To address the challenges, the University turned to BusinessOptix to provide end-to-end process intelligence capabilities to enhance documentation and analysis.
- Map Future and Current States: Ability to map both future and current states on the same model.
- Model Impacts: Model the financial and resource impact of future states, providing clarity on the benefits and impacts of changes.
- Link Master Data to Models: Link standardized master data to enrich models and store this in a centralized repository.
- Create a Centralized Repository: Establish a single source of truth for all processes and associated documentation for ease of collaboration and accessibility.
- Identify Process Relationships: Connect and create relationships between processes to ensure content integrity and demonstrate the impacts of changes.
By providing user-friendly and intelligent tooling beyond the limitations of Visio, BusinessOptix enabled both process authors and operational users at the university to create a data-driven repository of process models, customer journey maps, transformation maps, and capability maps.
“As a 'customer' of process maps produced on both BusinessOptix and Microsoft Visio across different projects, I have found the process of sitting with a Business Analyst mapping a process to be far quicker on BusinessOptix. The functionality of being able to map 'as is' and 'future states' alongside each other whilst also tagging the systems used and team responsible is extremely useful.
Recently several colleagues and I mapped a process using Visio. The process took far longer and more meetings than it would have done on BusinessOptix, resulting in an increase to the University in terms of staff time (and patience required!)."
HR Operations Lead, University of Reading
"Using BusinessOptix to map our current processes allowed us to explain a complicated network of systems and integrations as simply as possible. Without it, we would not have been able to map this, and therefore it has saved us a considerable amount of time in explaining the same things to different groups of people. It also makes it easy to refer back to this information as and when it is needed."