Achieving Operational

Excellence through BPM

James Smith & Jaz Khangura

Opinion Poll

Introduction

Birkbeck Case Study

Q & A

1

2

3

About Birkbeck

London’s only

specialist

provider of

evening higher

education

Birkbeck was founded

in 1823 as the London

Mechanics Institute

Birkbeck counts four

Nobel prize winners

and a British Prime

Minister among its

former students and

staff

Drivers for change

Birkbeck Knows about change!...

2007 ELQ funding changes (c. 40% drop in HEFCE teaching-grant)

Strategic Review

2012 Fees & Funding Changes

Downturn in part-time student numbers

HEFCE Catalyst Funding

Staff & Students

Estates Finance HR Registry Library

Schools

Welcome to Silo-land

Objectives

Implement an Operational Excellence Programme through BPM

Define high-volume processes to be automated and implement them quickly

Increase speed and quality of data

Reduce complexity, duplication and errors

Build cross-functional processes across many university units

Empower business users to implement their own small-scale process

improvements

1

2

3

4

5

6

What did we do?

Work with an external facilitation partner to run

business process improvement workshops – to

discover and identify opportunities for process

improvement

Look to procure a software solution to help us

manage and orchestrate our processes – and we

procured Bizagi

1

2

Basic modeling

Providing a common utility for process diagramming, using

BPMN standard

…narrowing the gap to technical developers, leading to…

Full managed process execution

Executing process

Providing case routing & work-lists

Integration with existing corporate systems via web services

Why Bizagi?

1

2

Bizagi Modeler

…create simple diagrams

Bizagi Studio (Executable)

…which can be refined to become the basis for executable processes

Bizagi Studio (Executable)

Define abstracted data models…

…and user interfaces for process participants…

…and business rules, assignment

rules, data integrations…

Our first Bizagi processStudent Status Amendment

This is the process by which our students:

Tell us they want to change mode of attendance

Tell us they want to change programme of study

Tell us they want to interrupt / suspend studies (take a break)

Tell us they want to leave (withdraw)

Historically a paper request, which turned into a series of email

exchanges, orchestrating a series of decisions and records

updates across a number of departments

Our first Bizagi processProcess discovery and improvement

Workshop to understand current process… …and how it performs

Why that is...

…and how we aspire to improve it

Agree a ‘to be process’

1

2

3

Our first Bizagi processStudent Status Amendment: Initiation

Web service callCreates case in Bizagi, routed to

users to complete first task

Our first Bizagi processStudent Status Amendment: Process Execution

Managed process is 90% faster than previous paper process!

Achievements

Student Status Amendment process 90% faster

Proportion of student debt resulting from ‘Promise to Apply’ is down 16%

3 processes deployed in under 12 months

"Fastfix" initiative to empower staff to instigate their own small scale process

improvements is operational

"My Birkbeck Profile" portal enables students to action their request online

Accessible to 18,000 students; average 3,000 cases closed per year

1

2

3

4

5

6

Staff & Students

Corporate Information Systems Infrastructure

A bright new world?...

Estates Finance HR Registry Library

Schools

Self-Service: My Birkbeck Framework

Other common services: Identity Database, Reporting

Get Data

?

Do something

Update

something

Send Email

OWN & MANAGE BUSINESS PROCESS

Do another

something

BPM: Bizagi

Best Practice

Involve all business owners in the BPM technology selection

Enlist support from external facilitator to define the first processes

Map processes, define workflows and share tasks with the business team

Promote and share your aims for Operational Excellence

Support and mentor colleagues’ process modeling efforts

Recognize that BPM does not reside in IT but should be a shared business tool

1

2

3

4

5

6

Opinion Poll

Questions