VALUE-DRIVEN BPM HAS COMPLETELY CHANGED THE WAY COMPANIES IMPLEMENT MICROSOFT DYNAMICS AX

Transcription

1 VALUE-DRIVEN BPM HAS COMPLETELY CHANGED THE WAY COMPANIES IMPLEMENT MICROSOFT DYNAMICS AX TO-INCREASE RAPIDVALUE DELIVERS ON THE PROMISE OF VALUE-DRIVEN BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT AX

2 CONTENTS Start Your ERP Project in the Right Direction... 3 From Management Art to Tangible ERP Advantages... 4 A Practical, Proven, Value-Based BPM Resource... 6 Learn More

3 SUMMARY: Start Your ERP Project in the Right Direction If you grab hold of just one business management concept this year, let it be value-driven business process management (BPM). In the realm of ERP, valuedriven BPM revolutionizes the way implementations happen and solutions generate tangible, long-term business value. This approach enables you to optimize your business processes and ensure that your ERP system and other technologies fully support the company s strategy and objectives. Whether your organization plans a first-time implementation or upgrades to Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, you have a challenging project ahead of you. To-Increase provides the tools and industry expertise to help you achieve a successful, low-risk deployment that fits the way your people and processes work, with a short trek to generating ROI. Customers around the globe use our value-driven BPM tool, RapidValue, to complete successful, efficient ERP implementations and maintain Microsoft Dynamics AX to pursue their goals and growth. With RapidValue, value-driven BPM becomes manageable, efficient, and powerful in enterprises as well as smaller organizations. Simply put, ERP deployments that do not incorporate value-driven BPM have a much lower likelihood of success. This paper gets you started in the right direction with a brief introduction to value-driven BPM and RapidValue 2014, the latest release of the solution. In addition to value-driven BPM, data migration and systems integration are key success components of your ERP deployment. We recommend that you give them due consideration. 3

4 From Management Art to Tangible ERP Advantages With RapidValue 2014, we effectively make proven, successful enterprise value-driven BPM practical and powerful for all kinds of organizations. RapidValue provides the processflow framework, information-capturing resource, and best practices that help you translate company strategy and business requirements into the application employees will use every day. The information repository in RapidValue serves as a comprehensive, centralized project reference from early planning through to a completed, business-wide rollout and on into the solution s further lifecycle. Because all project contributors and stakeholders have access to the same, complete information, RapidValue also eliminates the sometimes costly dependency on key individuals who own certain processes or information, and whose availability may change. 4

5 The originators of value-driven BPM, most of them management experts associated with Accenture, aimed to improve on the more traditional BPM approach, in which the connection of processes with strategies can remain opaque and there is not always a clear direction for determining which processes to improve. In forward-looking enterprises, value-driven BPM can become a discipline that provides effective management for innovation. Mostly through its successful application in software deployments, value-driven BPM has crossed over from the enterprise world into the realm of midsize and smaller businesses. In large-scale software implementations such as ERP systems, value-driven BPM is a powerful approach to manage projects so that their results support and enable companies strategies. SHORTCOMINGS OF CONVENTIONAL IMPLEMENTATIONS Horror stories about failed ERP implementations can make for entertaining and scary reading. In other instances, the level of drama may not be as high, but the costs and frustrations are real and painful. Companies spend millions and invest many thousands of person hours in ERP rollouts that do not yield the productivity and efficiency advantages businesses sought, never quite come to completion, require costly customization and additional software tools, or are not fully adopted by users. Too many times, ERP search committees define goals, identify a winning solution, and exit the scene. Even with the best skills and intentions, implementers may be adrift because they may not be aware of all of the requirements for the ERP solution from all business stakeholders and departments, because they were not comprehensively captured initially. When stakeholders make decisions that change the requirements, the deployment team may not always be able to keep up with these changes. Without ensuring proper alignment, decisions that affect the ERP project may not even be strategically sound. Given these gaps, ERP implementers may end up re-creating existing processes in another technology environment, including the inefficiencies and process hurdles that may have prompted the decision to deploy an ERP system in the first place. KEY ROLE OF STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT Value-driven BPM ensures the strategic alignment of ERP implementations, so that organizational strategy, processes, and technologies firmly and sustainably sync. Much of the thinking behind value-driven BPM seems commonsensical. You begin with clear objectives and involve all the right people in a productive approach that facilitates easy collaboration and communication. You make sure that business stakeholders and IT understand and support what company leadership wants to accomplish through an ERP implementation. However, with the right set of tools to facilitate value-driven BPM, successfully performing an ERP deployment demands almost superhuman discipline and coordination. NEED FOR A VALUE-BASED BPM- ENABLING TOOL From the beginning of your ERP project, you need a structured, holistic process approach to ensure that stakeholders connect and communicate without organizational hurdles or geography getting in the way. You also have to document your goals, processes, and the improvements you aim to accomplish. You want to capture decisions, meetings, and expertise. When it gets close to your implementation of a pilot project, there is even more information to track: Project definitions, processes reflected in the ERP solution, test results, training schedules and content, and more. Lacking an effective tool to collect and manage all of this information, ERP deployments run a substantial risk of straying away from their objectives, budgets, and schedules. Just like companies at a certain stage of maturity cannot move forward without ERP, truly effective ERP implementations are almost impossible to realize without a powerful, value-driven BPM tool. To help companies looking to implement an ERP system achieve their goals by means of value-driven BPM, To-Increase provides RapidValue for Microsoft Dynamics AX. 5

6 A Practical, Proven, Value-Based BPM Resource With RapidValue 2014, we effectively make proven, successful enterprise value-driven BPM practical and powerful for all kinds of organizations. RapidValue provides the processflow framework, information-capturing resource, and best practices that help you translate company strategy and business requirements into the application employees will use every day. The information repository in RapidValue serves as a comprehensive, centralized project reference from early planning through to a completed, business-wide rollout and on into the solution s further lifecycle. Because all project contributors and stakeholders have access to the same, complete information, RapidValue also eliminates the sometimes costly dependency on key individuals who own certain processes or information, and whose availability may change. 6

7 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT REPLACES DOCUMENT- CENTRIC PRACTICES In any ERP project, files of different types can abound s, spec documents, process diagrams, meeting protocols, key user evaluations, and many others. Many companies attempt to implement their ERP system following a document-based approach, saving all files on a central intranet site. This practice is too simplistic to do justice to a complex business operation and ERP. It is generally not efficient to collect and maintain all the documents, and adjusting them when the project scope or process definitions change can be an arduous task. It is difficult to extend a document-centric practice to all business processes. Following this approach, it also usually takes too long to complete an implementation. RapidValue obviates the painstaking, laborious, generally ineffective document management. Instead, knowledge management with RapidValue lets you collect and maintain information in the central repository in a highly structured, efficient manner. BREADTH OF IMPLEMENTATI- ON METHODO- LOGIES RapidValue supports many ERP implementation methodologies companies choose to follow, including Microsoft Sure Step. While the solution targets Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 deployments, exposes the business database within the ERP system, and uses its familiar user interface, it can extend to other applications and the processes they facilitate. Companies have made use of RapidValue, for example, to include other ERP systems, such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV, in their valuedriven BPM strategy. TEMPLATES SIMPLIFY IMPLE- MENTATIONS AND REDUCE RISK The solution makes extensive use of process and role templates, which incorporate the experience of To-Increase s industry and technology experts in many customer projects. The use of templates serves to minimize risk, and simplify and speed the implementation process and improve the manageability of the resulting ERP deployment, because it promotes a high level of standardization. Instead of painstakingly re-creating processes and roles that are common to many companies in an industry, RapidValue users can adopt proven templates and concentrate more on the aspects of their business that are unique to them. FAST AVENUE TO COMPANY OBJECTIVES By using RapidValue to align people, strategy, systems, processes, and their ERP implementations, companies also bring their organizational objectives within closer reach. Business have successfully used the structured valuedriven BPM approach, for example, to enable their transformation into lean organizations. RapidValue can support and enhance the strategic alignment of ERP throughout a solution s entire lifecycle, and also facilitates the efficient publishing of help content and process documentation. I love that RapidValue makes it easy to create a centralized repository of all data and knowledge in an ERP project. This capability very much speeds up the process of prioritizing business needs and building them into the solution. Also, publishing help and documentation content becomes a snap, which means people can take advantage of it instead of avoiding an unpleasant chore. Ladd May, Senior Business Consultant for Microsoft Dynamics AX, Columbus Global 7

8 EMPOWERMENT FOR TECHNOLOGY PROVIDERS To-Increase partners have adopted RapidValue to reduce the risk of implementation projects, control their costs, and deliver greater customer value. For many of them, the solution is a preferred tool starting with the solution evaluation and demo stage through to roll-outs and enhancements. They often also use RapidValue to create industry- or vertical-specific business process models, which they use as starting points in implementations. NEW CAPABILITIES IN RAPIDVALUE 2014 In the latest release of RapidValue, we translated requests and ideas from our customers and partners into a number of new and enhanced features that can help businesses gain greater value from value-driven BPM. They include: Process-driven test management. You can automatically create tests from processes including test cases for each activity and test suites for each flow based on your business model. You can make revisions based on your recorded test runs. Support for Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services, a cloud-based solution that offers a collaborative workspace in which companies and their technology providers can manage ERP implementations and access standard process models based on American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC). By importing recordings created with the Task Recorder Plus in Microsoft Dynamics AX, you can incorporate any Lifecycle Services content into RapidValue, where you define and create your processes. Extensive multilanguage capabilities enable you to save costs and time in international implementations. By translating content and publishing it in multiple languages, you can easily take the same RapidValue model and the revisions you make to it across the entire enterprise. Role-based user guidance and favorites. Users can rely on consistent, context-aware process guidance and add favorites to represent the tasks in their roles. Enhanced implementation support. Libraries of implementation questions you create and map to business process models are available in process verifications and gap analyses to ensure you identify and meet all solution requirements. Solution statistics highlight the stage of completion and composition of your RapidValue solution, help you track its maturation and changes, draw attention to areas that require additional work, and assist in validating solution models. Greater role for content. Because all content now belongs to a solution, you can create and maintain repositories in RapidValue with more effective user guidance and content governance. The To-Increase Release Notes and What s New documents give a complete, detailed overview of all new and enhanced solution features in RapidValue We have pursued the vision of an effective valuedriven BPM software solution for many years. It s deeply fulfilling to see it come to life in our customers operations and have a positive impact on everybody in the company, from the executive suite to the shop floor. Petur Snaeland, Chief Architect, To-Increase 8

9 ERP RESULTS PROVE THE SOUNDNESS AND PRACTICALITY OF VALUE- DRIVEN BPM Some companies diligently measure the ROI and other results of their ERP implementations, and many others do not. When it comes to value-driven BPM, even fewer companies have found ways to effectively assess the performance of this approach. In ERP projects supported by RapidValue, however, many customers know exactly what they want to accomplish and what they hope to avoid. While they may not precisely measure events and outcomes, they know what success means to them, especially if they have gone through flawed ERP deployments in the past. Thus, one of the key outcomes that many RapidValue users consider meaningful is bringing their projects in on time and within budgets. Achieving this usually means the value-driven BPM approach delivered results change management was efficient, the solution and processes mapped well, communications and collaborations were effective, and the original project goals found their way to realization in the deployment. Another important value is fast and lasting solution adoption by business groups and individual employees. Stakeholders have a way of avoiding and abandoning ERP when it does not support their objectives and processes. With RapidValue, companies often accomplish very rapid and enthusiastic user adoption without a drop-off as the solution matures and adjusts to changing business requirements. Many companies using RapidValue have clearly articulated goals for what they wish to accomplish with their ERP deployments, including, for example, measurable savings and efficiencies, growth goals, the ability to serve a market segment more effectively. When many businesses that side-stepped value-driven BPM are struggling to complete their ERP deployments in the first place, the results realized by those that follow this approach clearly demonstrate its value. It s a huge productivity and efficiency advantage that RapidValue allows users to work in the native AX environment. They do not have to waste time leaving the space and struggling with bringing their work back into it. For example, single-button publishing of help content to the user community, in the perfect AX-appropriate format, is an outstanding capability all by itself. Ladd May, Senior Business Consultant for Microsoft Dynamics AX, Columbus Global 9

10 Learn More If you are planning to implement Microsoft Dynamics AX or upgrade to the latest version, now is the time to consider value-driven BPM. Our business process management and technology experts are available to assist you and your technology provider in creating the perfect alignment of strategies, resources, processes, and technologies. We look forward to hearing from you. Connect with the leader of the To-Increase RapidValue team, Petur Snaeland. Read our blog, updated frequently, and connect with us on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Contact To-Increase. We can also help you find a great technology partner in your area and industry. We also recommend that you include the often overlooked, yet critical concerns of data migration and systems integration in your ERP planning. Read our white paper and learn how To-Increase Business Integration Solutions can help. Sometimes companies worry too much about doing things right and not enough about doing the right things. We help them find a healthy balance and run their business strategically, following the right priorities. Petur Snaeland, Software Architect, To-Increase 10

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12 Contact addresses The Netherlands (HQ) To-Increase B.V. Kazemat NR Veenendaal The Netherlands phone +31(0) fax +31(0) Microsoft Dynamics AX is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation The To-Increase Logo is a registered trademark of To-Increase BV. The information contained in this document represents the current view of To-Increase B.V. on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because To-Increase must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of To-Increase B.V, To-Increase B.V. cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication. This document is for informational purposed only. To-Increase B.V. makes no warrantees, express, implied or statutory, as to the information in this document. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without the limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of To-Increase B.V.