Case Studies

Business Process Design & Rationalization for SAP Case Study

Utilizing Confiance Group's expertise in the use and application of the ARIS and SAP Platforms, our client was able to develop robust, SAP-based business focused models to improve business processes across the organization.

Confiance led a global, privately-held company in an SAP-driven business transformation initiative by providing expertise in the use and application of the ARIS for SAP Platform. Our client faced business practice-versus-theory implementation issues. To construct and execute a substantial business process documentation project plan, the company sought expertise on how to take SAP-centric models that had come from its Solution Manager environment and translate them into a view of how the company executed relevant business processes.

The Challenge

Our client aimed to establish a business repository that could be leveraged for end-user training, project roll-outs and process optimization. Using the ARIS Platform, modeling techniques and process documentation as a foundation, this would lead ultimately to implementing BPM in coming years.

Since our client was a seasoned user of the SAP software suite (with modules implemented around the globe), its executive management decided it was time to effectively employ the ARIS Platform—using the SAP processes as a base—to more fully model how the company's various business processes were being implemented. This entailed moving SAP process models from Solution Manager into ARIS and in educating the company's SAP implementation team in creating relevant ARIS methods at different levels of abstraction. Several challenges arose:

• Resources were constantly being moved in and out of the Center of Excellence.
• Not everyone had adequate training in the ARIS Platform.
• Most team members had no business modeling experience.
• The company faced an aggressive completion deadline for this initiative.

The Solution

As a trusted partner in delivering value to make businesses more competitive, Confiance began by helping our client to resolve strategic conflicts around the SAP Solution Manager structure (versus what the ARIS process structure should be) and in migrating models from one structure to the other. "Confiance helped transform our technical SAP information into an enterprise business repository to establish a solid foundation for successfully using BPM," said a client senior manager. Experienced Confiance practitioners helped to evolve our client's standards, conventions and approach in order to position the company for success. As the project kicked off, Confiance experts provided practical, on-site ARIS refresher training to ensure a rapid learning curve. Finally, we mentored their team by reviewing each member's progress over a period of several weeks, providing real-world examples, and offering constructive criticism and suggestions on how to improve quality and content of models.

The Result

The ARIS enablement and mentoring initiative has been extremely successful—receiving praise and positive feedback from their senior management. "Confiance was adept at understanding our environment and accelerated our skills development," noted a senior manager. "They saved us from many trial-and-error situations in modeling techniques and in fully utilizing ARIS. We're getting favorable reactions as we expose the tool and techniques to our business partners and other CIS organizations."

Today, their models reflect a high degree of accuracy, robust business content and uniformity. A more consistent set of methods and conventions are in place, and team members have been properly mentored in the application and the business modeling process to more effectively address key business drivers including agility and scalability, reduced time to market, operational efficiency and corporate governance.