Transformational BPM

 At To-Increase, we experience many of the same changes and challenges we hear about from our customers. That helps us understand what they tell us. What’s more, it also keeps our solution development anchored in reality.

Not so long ago, our company was all about its products. It’s how we thought of ourselves, how we planned resources, and how we approached customers and helped them address their business concerns. Today, on the other hand, we are undertaking a transformative journey into a completely customer-centric organization.

That transition entails a change in perspective that we also see taking place in other organizations. The ability to deliver solutions in the cloud, offering affordable, flexible subscription models, gives both our customers and us more flexibility to meet their requirements in a highly targeted manner and help them weather changes in their industry. This prompts us to think about, redefine, and document what makes our solutions unique and valuable, and what our strategy should be to take them to customers in such a way that they achieve the outcomes they look for.

Such an effort also makes it necessary for us to remap our processes to mirror our customers’ decision-making and purchasing processes. For instance, we know that companies take time to perform their own, thorough research long before they contact any software vendors. We have to support them with helpful, relevant content at each juncture of their buying journey.

A mid-stream business transformation, where you continue to run operations while reinventing the company, need to be skillfully managed. You don’t want to distract employees or slow revenue generation. Let’s take a closer look at the many moving pieces you need to keep in mind.

Technical and industry change does not stop while you sharpen your customer focus, and the competitors are still nipping at your heels. The executives driving the transformative effort need to spend their time wisely on those aspects of the business that most help it succeed. They have to create the teams that execute on the company’s vision and strategy, bringing together the right mix of personalities and skills that makes for sustained, successful collaboration.

Executives also need to set clear guide posts regarding the company’s purpose and mission, so everybody can take appropriate action and the individual contributors can assess the impact of their behaviors. Communications and team learning are essential in ensuring that everybody in the company understands how the organization best serves customers and approaches its target markets.

Finally, executives have to define and set in motion the processes that involve every contributor and all resources in realizing the company’s strategy by means of many different activities. Each of these have their own reason for being and specific success criteria.

For most of us in executive roles, it’s very easy to spend the day on a great variety of business concerns and tactical details. Some of those may be essential, but others could be handled by somebody else, are not very important even though they garner attention, or depend on events that have yet to occur. With the best of intentions, execs can quickly lose sight of the strategic import and the organizational context of their work.

We use a software tool to keep our executives – and our various teams – on track and to ensure that our activities make sense strategically: the RapidValue BPM Suite for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Dynamics AX. As a business process management (BPM) solution , RapidValue was originally designed to foster successful software deployments and help companies realize their technology goals and ROI within their desired timeframes. Learning from and with our customers, we have found that RapidValue can be used for more than streamlining complex ERP, CRM, and other software projects. It can powerfully support and streamline the transformative efforts you undergo when you become a customer-centric company where every role and every activity delivers value that makes a difference to customers.

In RapidValue, you can document and evolve your company’s strategy. In sync with that strategy, you use the solution to design the roles, accountabilities, skills, and teams the company needs. You also use RapidValue to model and refine the processes that need to take place in the company. Within the tool, you can create the process and role documentation that helps contributors understand what their responsibilities are, why they need to take certain actions, and how their work interacts with the company’s roles and processes. RapidValue provides the environment where you can create, experiment, implement, and assess the business outcomes of roles and processes. It gives you a centralized reference to eliminate any ambiguities in how people and processes need to operate. If you rely on software systems to run the business, it ensures their strategic alignment with your company’s goals and strategy, at the same time simplifying and accelerating implementations.

If your executive mission includes advancing your organization’s digital transformation or redesigning processes to map to your customers’ buyer journey and interests, RapidValue can make your life easier and keep you moving in the right direction. It works for us, and we’ve seen many other companies use it with great success in powering their transformative efforts. It’s awesome to observe the creativity at work when people expand the usefulness of a software tool far beyond its original purpose.

I’ll be happy to tell you more about transformational BPM or show you how RapidValue can help you realize your strategic priorities. Send me a note at lcunha@to-increase.com and I’ll respond as soon as I can.