A leading Australian Bank has been leveraging BPM (through, among other things, the ARIS solution), for over a decade now. For a number of reasons (including poor tool configuration), their BPM capability was not producing the expected results. After a tooling review management brought in Leonardo Consulting to help with the setup of BPM best practices in the tasks of ARIS tool configuration, process measurement and governance, and process optimisation

Over the past 100 years, this bank has grown to a business with more than 52,000 employees and 800,000 shareholders, offering a full range of financial services to help all Australians build and manage their finances. Today, a major financial institution, the bank plays an important role in enabling economic and social development, supporting jobs, growth, innovation and opportunities for people and businesses around Australia and the region. The Group is one of the largest listed companies on the Australian Securities Exchange and is included in the Morgan Stanley Capital Global Index.

With its BPM maturity slowly rising over the last few years, the bank realised that it could get more out of its investments in BPM and ARIS endeavours. Looking out at BPM in a holistic way, the bank identified opportunities for more business alignment, consistent modelling standards across initiatives, and increased reuse of process models and process ownership, all of which having the potential to result in higher value from the data generated by the organisation.

As part of an original phase 1 project performed in late 2015, Leonardo gathered all the information from various stakeholders to identify the requirements for the project, including the BPM, Enterprise Architecture, Process Ownership and Measurement, and Process Improvement requirements. This requirements gathering revealed a need for:

1. Integration of all aspects of EA and BPM (EA and BPM development was done completely independently – with different teams and in different databases).
2. Additional rigour required in the modelling and modelling decomposition standards.
3. An easier and more robust way to release EA and BPM content into the development environment.
4. Guidelines on how to find the right process metrics, established standards for what constitute good KPIs, and provided advice on how to gather them.
5. Established standard for the role and responsibilities of a process owner.

Based on the outcome of this first preliminary project, Leonardo Consulting executed the following phase 2 project in 4 stages:

1. The technical BPM basis was implemented in ARIS. Starting with the design of the ARIS metamodel, Leonardo went on to define improved modelling conventions and implement a new filter and template. The conventions database was then set up along with the related process model release cycle management (RCM), and finally it automated the modelling quality checks (semantic checks) for higher quality modelling output.
2. The BPM “pillars” were strengthened: the process architecture levelling concept was revamped, process measurement (e.g. types and example of metrics, how to find the best metric(s) depending on process criteria) concepts were refined, and the process ownership concept (e.g. how and why implement process ownership) was implemented.
3. Two critical processes were analysed in depth. After installing the Process Performance Management (PPM) solution, two HIPS (High Impact Processes) were modelled in their current state. For proper analysis, the real operations’ data was extracted, and the process performance was analysed. From this analysis, Leonardo was able to measure and visualise the real performance as compared to the modelled current state, and to create bespoke reports on that process performance in collaboration with Management.
4. All tasks performed were detailed in comprehensive reports: All the ARIS tooling setup was captured into a modular report that can be generated in a few clicks, the process measurement and governance principles were detailed in detailed papers, and a set of reports were handed over for the process improvement tasks.

The project also comprised of general BPM support including process modelling review, process architecture advisory, report scripting and ARIS and process modelling training advisory.

Setting up a proper foundation to all the BPM endeavours has been very beneficial for the bank.

Thanks to the creation of a best practice meta-model for the ARIS tool, there is now a clear understanding on how the different elements of EA and BPM and interact with each other, which in turn increases cross-domain analysis, and facilitates reuse of models/objects. The development of tailored modelling conventions, combined with a new filter (allowing only certain objects and models) and templates, as well as automated quality checks – through semantic checks - significantly increases the quality and consistency of the bank’s output, which can now be released fast and  securely thanks to the revamped Release Cycle Management.

The new standards in terms of process measurement enable this bank to have a repeatable way to find the best process measures, while the process governance principles helps the bank identify who is best suited to act upon these process measures as part of his or her role as a process owner.

Finally, thanks to the detailed analysis of two core organisational processes, Leonardo was able to highlight the differences between the ‘theoretical’ current state (what the bank thought the process was) and the ‘real’ current state (what the process truly is based on data analysis), uncovering improvement potential on both High Impact Processes. Thanks to in-depth data analysis of real process measures, Leonardo created a series of custom-made dashboards with input management to provide a clear picture of the performance of the two processes. This analysis helped identify improvement opportunities for those million dollar processes.

Overall, this BPM project executed for this organisation to set up a foundation for the bank to leverage more and more benefits from BPM tools and techniques. Following Leonardo’s 7 Enablers framework, with such foundation, the process architecture is more consistent across the organisation, with individual processes being measured with the right KPIs, and acted upon by a responsible process owner. With that setup in place, this Australian bank is in a great position to further use BPM to improve its processes, deriving real business value on a regular basis.