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26islanders - Mp3: Speakers: Hans Skalle, WW Websphere Value Selling, Ibm Swanie Tolentino, Senior Marketing Manager, BPM

This podcast discusses how combining Lean Six Sigma with Business Process Management (BPM) can help companies accelerate business results and improve productivity. Lean Six Sigma aims to streamline processes and reduce waste, while BPM provides tools to monitor processes, quickly change rules, and share best practices. Specifically, BPM technologies allow companies to identify bottlenecks, respond rapidly to issues, and implement improvements across an organization through reusable services and processes. The guest provides examples of customers using BPM to target improvement projects and enable continuous process adaptation without IT involvement.

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133 views3 pages

26islanders - Mp3: Speakers: Hans Skalle, WW Websphere Value Selling, Ibm Swanie Tolentino, Senior Marketing Manager, BPM

This podcast discusses how combining Lean Six Sigma with Business Process Management (BPM) can help companies accelerate business results and improve productivity. Lean Six Sigma aims to streamline processes and reduce waste, while BPM provides tools to monitor processes, quickly change rules, and share best practices. Specifically, BPM technologies allow companies to identify bottlenecks, respond rapidly to issues, and implement improvements across an organization through reusable services and processes. The guest provides examples of customers using BPM to target improvement projects and enable continuous process adaptation without IT involvement.

Uploaded by

Venkat Jay
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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26Islanders.

mp3

Combining Business Process Management with Lean Six Sigma to Accelerate Business Results
Speakers: Hans Skalle, WW WebSphere Value Selling, IBM Swanie Tolentino, Senior Marketing Manager, BPM Hello and thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. This is the part of the series on tips on how to thrive in todays economy with Business Process Management. Today we will be covering the value of using Business Process Management to accelerate the business results from your Lean Six Sigma initiative. Joining me today is Hans Skalle. Hans is a past master evaluator for Minnesotas Malcolm Baldridge Base Quality Award. Hans has been using technology to improve business processes and organizational performance for more than 25 years. He recently completed and IBM Red Guide for business entitled Aligning Business Process Management, Service Oriented Architecture and Lean Six Sigma for Real Business Results. Welcome Hans. Thank you Swanie, its a pleasure to be here. For the benefit of our listeners out there, can you give us a brief description of what Lean Six Sigma is all about? Sure I can. Lean Six Sigma, Swanie, is a combination of two successful improvement and design methodologies--Lean and Six Sigma. Lean which evolved from the Toyota production system of the 50s and 60s places emphasis on removing waste and non-value adding activities from the business processes and on the balancing of workloads. In a lean organization, the improvement is typically accomplished through <Kizan> events which are rapid-cycle improvement projects intended to deliver results quickly. The Six Sigma concept was developed in the mid 80s with Motorola and contributed to their winning the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award. Six Sigma places emphasis on the removing of the causes of variation and exceptions within processesdefects-- and on optimizing its performance relative to customer requirements. Generally the cause of variation must be discovered, so here we find the more rigorous statistical analysis tools and techniques. Over the last ten years a growing need to accelerate the rate of improvement has lead to the combination of the two. Over the last 3-4 years this continued pressure to deliver results more quickly has lead some companies to bring IT into the picture more aggressively as well enabled by advances in Business Process Management and Monitoring technologies and standards such as Services Oriented Architecture. Today, leading companies are finding Lean Six Sigma, BPM and SOA to be a very powerful combination. So, Hans, based on what is happening in todays economy, what is your perspective of how Lean Six Sigma and BPM can help companies survive and thrive?

Well, Swanie, taking cost out of operations and processes is at the top of every CEOs agenda today. Thats why youll find interest in Lean Six Sigma tends to grow in more challenging economic times. Lean techniques are designed to eliminate wasteful activities and practices and eliminating errors and the cost of corrective actions all mean money saved and improved productivity. Companies are looking for ways to do this especially now and adding Technology. BPM and SOA to the mix it accelerates results and increases flexibility as well. <Lachinsy> Study even found that applying Lean principles to application development and maintenance can improve IT productivity by 20-40%. On launching this productivity it frees resources to get at the IT backlog, to get it under control and to take on BPM projects that improve business productivity as well. So they all work together. So, tell us more. What role can IT and technology play in driving the companys business objectives in Lean Six Sigma? As well, youve mentioned BPM. Can you tell us more about how BPM specifically connects (inaudible) bringing business results for companies out there listening today who may be implementing Lean Six Sigma? Heres another interesting quote from a Mackenzie article: When Business and IT Executives jointly take an end-to-end look at Business Processes, the resulting investments can have up to 10Xthe impact of traditional IT cost reduction efforts. In a down economy, however, its not uncommon for the business to freeze the IT budget. Freezing the budget limits ITs ability to help through the application of technology. In fact, it may lock IT into a maintenance-only mode where the majority of the budget goes to simply maintaining existing systems, maintaining the status quo. Alternatively, by investing in BPM and SOA technology, it arms IT and Lean Six Sigma Teams with new tools and capabilities. Process monitoring and predictive measures allow process owners to respond more quickly to bottlenecks and out of bounds conditions that appear in processes. Business rules and policies allow process variation to be abstracted from software code where its difficult to change and expensive to maintain. Managed workloads with built-in escalations and alerts replace manual and email processes. System integration eliminates data rekeying and errors and Reusable Services and Processes allow improvements in Best Practices to be more easily replicated and shared across the organization. All of these things are of interest to Lean Six Sigma professions. Thanks, Hans, and I think to help our listeners out there further, can you give me specific examples of how companies are leveraging BPM as a key part of their Lean Six Sigma initiative? Sure, Swanie, a number of our Lean Six Sigma customers are deploying Monitor first and they use the data captured by Monitor to identify constraints in their processes and target their improvement projects. This improves the stability and the use of predictive measures also allows

action to be taken before problems occur while facilitating a natural improvement by process workers even in advance of formal projects. Still other customers have used their Business Rules and Policies capabilities to allow process owners to quickly change rules-driven processes without IT involvement and to more effectively manage the rules that are otherwise buried in application code, paper documentation, and even in peoples heads. Reusable services are the key, of course, as they speed the sharing of Best Practices while increasing flexibility. Those are just a few of the ways that our Lean Six Sigma customers are bringing together BPM, Services Oriented Architecture and Lean Six Sigma. Thank you Hans, your expertise in this area is extremely valuable to many companies looking to eliminate waste and taking out cost in todays tough economy. Its been my pleasure Swanie and thank you for having me. To our listeners out there, if you are already implementing or planning to implement Lean Six Sigma, I hope this has been valuable for you. Consider the use of Business Process Management to accelerate your business results. Please also take the time to download other podcasts in the series on how BPM can help companies in todays tough economic times. For more information, go online at www.ibm.com/software/innovate where you can also find a posted webcasts on this very topic as well as a Business Paper. Its been a pleasure to bring you todays feature on tips for thriving in todays economy with Business Process Management.

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