1. What did you do last night?
We were on the BPE Award ceremony in Munich, just before ARIS ProcessWorld. It was a good organized evening event with all Award winners. We had a very nice table together with AB Volvo, winners of the Process-driven SAP Award. Board member Wolfram Jost joined our table, we had interesting conversations with him about the challenges of Océ and the way ARIS can support this by future innovations. Mr Jost did some interesting suggestions. We won the SOA/Enterprise Architecture Award of which we are very proud within Océ Technologies, said Wim van den Akker, Corporate Business Architect at Océ.
2. What did you actually achieve with ARIS?
Louis Anderson, Corporate Application Architect, explains that Océ achieved with ARIS as enabler harmonized processes and standardized IT in Europe. We harmonized based on best practices of the leading operating companies. USA is following now. ARIS was of help realizing a Single Point Of Truth (repository). IT uses ARIS to maintain the IT assets, Business uses ARIS representing the processes and the business requirements towards IT. In this way harmonizing processes and standardizing IT went hand in hand. By harmonization of the processes of Order-to-Cash the number of process variants were reduced by 30%. That reduction was realized before implementing this in a new ERP environment. So less IT resources and time were necessary to spend during implementation.
3. What were the success factors you faced during the globalization program?
Louis continues: Governance is crucial. We started the program properly with all stakeholders of the enterpise architectures appointed, discussing the objectives, ownership and release procedures. Although we did that, we actually could embed this way of working faster in the standing organization instead of within the program. In the end it is all about the people; tools and consulting can only support. You have to get the people behind the program and make them aware about process orientated thinking, otherwise it is very difficult to standardize. So good training is necessary. Another success factor is top management commitment. We had that with our board member responsible for Operational Excellence.
4. Isn’t this BPM or really Enterprise Architecture Management?
Jan Trienekens is Application Architect on Headquarters and is willing to answer this fourth question. He says that beside the business processes and supporting applications, also the Information and Technology architecture are maintained including the interrelations.
Jan emphasises that a lot has been achieved in EA modelling, with the aim to reduce the gap between Business processes and supporting applications. Although Océ runs various platforms based on different technologies, the ARIS solutions enable us to document and publish the information in a unified way. That is actually a prerequisite to do impact analyses for change requests (which we receive daily) and improve decision making.
The role based publication of changes from the integrated Business & IT repository via the News feature brings changed content to the end users in a controlled way. ARIS also supports the transformation from current to future state architectures.
It feels great that we are recognized on this by IDS Scheer. Louis, Jan and Wim are now smiling and pointing proudly at the (30 cm high) BPE Award on the table.
Reading four answers by Océ about winning the BPE Award for Enterprise Architecture is nice, but it's even more interesting to hear about their EA project successes. You can view now the background in a short and nice interview with the Corporate Application Architect. Just click here.
