case study business process management

Case Studies of Business Process Management Transformation

By: Author Alex Lim

Posted on Published: September 10, 2020 - Last updated: October 26, 2020

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Emerging industry processes will require businesses to learn to use automated tools, like low-code platforms, in order to streamline business process management. Read on this article which dives into the prevalence of low-code and 3 insightful case studies.

Table of Contents

The cloud widens the community of developers, automation and rules that write themselves, case study: modernization leads to self-service at bp, case study: asahi tekko achieves real-time production management, case study: bbva ramps up customer experience, digitally.

The cloud widens the community of developers Automation and rules that write themselves Case study: Modernization leads to self-service at BP Case study: Asahi Tekko achieves real-time production management Case study: BBVA ramps up customer experience, digitally Conclusion

Digital enterprises, employing artificial intelligence, cloud, and data analytics in innovative ways, are delivering superior customer experiences, faster response times, and more intelligent operations. Every company—no matter how large, how old, or in what industry— can potentially evolve into a digital enterprise, operating with the same agility of a startup.

Achieving this digital nimbleness requires relying on software and data resources that make use of legacy data, as well as the many new sources of data available today, and extend well beyond the traditional capabilities of IT departments. Digital nimbleness is an enterprise initiative, in which employees and executives from all parts of the business play an active role in designing and building solutions.

Enabling a wider group within the enterprise to design or redesign process-driven applications represents the most expedient and effective way to successfully navigate the digital transformation journey. Business processes evolve and change as rapidly as the business changes—meeting customer preferences, releasing new products, pivoting to new markets, and forging new partnerships. Today’s generation of business process management (BPM) and business rules management systems (BRMS) solutions offer a way to rapidly build modern applications with a minimum drain on precious and expensive IT resources.

The only way to advance and compete is to open up software innovation across enterprises— to business users who typically do not have traditional programming skills, but who need to be able to harness the power of technology. This means evolving the way applications are being built and deployed. Indeed, a survey of 324 companies found 76% indicating that at least some portion of their applications were developed outside of their traditional IT departments or IT service providers.

“Without low-code and no-code development, organizations are going to find it increasingly difficult to keep pace with their competitors,” reports SD Times, which quotes Rob Koplowitz, VP and principal analyst at Forrester3: “If we look at basic issues companies have now, what we often hear is, ‘I can’t build applications fast enough and by the time I build them the specs have changed.’

The rise of user-driven development and digital business process management is being made possible in two ways:

The cloud makes application development accessible to a wider audience. Having online, easy-to-use, front-end tools available to non-developers opens up new ways of conceiving and building applications.
Automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning enable a much wider variety of manual processes and tasks to be automated. AI-based engines are now being integrated into business process management, producing rules that write themselves. Low-level tasks also can be rapidly automated through robotic process automation (RPA), in which tasks are managed by intelligent software.

The path to digital transformation varies from organization to organization, of course, since they have invested in countless systems and applications over the years. But all successful efforts have certain common ingredients as well.

In every digital transformation project, new applications and next-generation architectures are built on today’s open standards, using on-demand resources.

For many organizations, digital transformation also means optimizing existing systems and application resources—integrating, replacing, or abstracting key pieces of their infrastructures into services.

By enabling a wider group within the enterprise to do design or redesign process-driven applications represent the most expedient and effective way to successfully navigate the digital transformation journey. Business processes evolve and change as rapidly as the business changes— meeting customer preferences, releasing new products, pivoting to new markets, and forging new partnerships. Today’s generation of business process management (BPM) and business rules management systems (BRMS) solutions offer a way to rapidly build modern applications with a minimum drain on precious and expensive IT resources.

For decades, only individuals with “developer” or “programmer” in their job titles held the keys to the applications that ran their organizations. This was for good reason—most enterprise applications tend to be very monolithic, difficult to understand, and difficult to change. The move from monolithic to microservices, as well as a move from traditional developers to a diverse mix of developers and business people, are reshaping the way applications are created, developed and deployed.

From monoliths to microservices : The process of application development is changing. And the technology employed to build applications is rapidly changing—to containers and microservices architectures that address the monolithic problem, making applications much easier to deploy, easier to change, and easier to understand. As a result, applications are becoming easier to create, deploy, and change. Cloud and container technologies now enable the breaking down of larger, monolithic applications into smaller components which can be managed and modified independently and deployed and scaled.
From traditional developers to diverse mixes of developers and businesspeople : Self-service environments make it possible for business users to develop and maintain applications without going through IT departments. The next generation of applications won’t be built purely by IT or traditional developers, but rather by teams that include business users, all contributing their knowledge and experience to these new microservices-based applications. These applications won’t require hard-core coding skills to change or adapt — rather, they need to be interfused with business logic and business know-how. Business users can’t necessarily write code, but they can produce models of their business that include business rules, along with the policies and decisions they make. Essentially, these models serve as source code for applications that can automatically be deployed within a microservices architecture.

Automation is also changing the game, delegating routine manual tasks and decision management to machines, thereby reducing manual work. Digital BPM and BRMS pave the way to AI, machine learning, and robotic process automation, which is revolutionizing the handling of the countless routine and manual tasks that slow down productivity.

Here’s how today’s systems are taking on the heavy lifting of today’s enterprises.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning : Artificial intelligence and machine learning are dramatically reshaping the way enterprises approach business automation. With machine learning, rules are derived automatically from historical records. This is in contrast to traditional decision management and business rules approaches when rules are created based on users’ experiences, and then built out in applications. Machine learning leverages historical data to derive predictive models that can be applied to new information for the next set of decisions.

For example, an application that helps determine whether insurance claims should be paid or denied can leverage predictive models built from historical claims information. The historical data provides an understanding of how claims decisions were made in the past. The claims application can use the predictive model to make decisions about new claims, which will be consistent with past behaviour.

Evolving standards are also facilitating the integration of AI and machine learning into business automation solutions. Predictive Model Markup Language, or PMML, enables predictive models to be encoded and shared among different systems. A relatively new standard, Decision Model & Notation, or DMN, is a graphical language for encoding the rules that make up a decision. DMN makes it easier for business users to create the source code for their decision applications, and to encode complex business logic. In addition, DMN enables business users to incorporate a predictive model into their DMN diagrams as easily as they can incorporate business rules. They can combine both the output of a predictive model with a set of rules in order to arrive at a decision.

In the big picture of application development, this means business users can create DMN logic, which can be employed within a container as a decision service. Or they can automatically feed predictive models from training data into that same process.

Robotic Process Automation : A recent survey by Deloitte finds a majority of enterprises, 53%, are now employing robotic process automation, or RPA. That number is expected to increase to 82% within the next two years.4 RPA enables the creation of software robots that perform repetitive and routine work that might otherwise be done by human workers. The benefits to organizations are reduced costs and headcount by automating work.

In many workplaces today, much time is spent on simple repetitive tasks, such as copying and pasting information from a back-office database into a spreadsheet. RPA enables enterprises to automate many of these routine tasks and functions. Essentially, the software robot records the work people are doing and replays it, with varying levels of intelligence applied. Basically, building out RPA is another approach to developing applications. Ultimately, these robots will be deployed as microservices through containers, supported by the cloud.

4 The robots are ready. Are you? Untapped advantage in your digital workforce, Deloitte, 2018.

BP, a global energy company, had a complex operational management challenge, with hundreds of product teams using various delivery models, affecting application development and deployment. The company wanted to explore a robust, modern, open-source technology infrastructure that could operate worldwide and be accessed by thousands of business users and millions of end customers. It needed a reliable, modern technology infrastructure to speed application development and deployment.

To accomplish this, BP worked with Red Hat to simplify and modernize technology and processes, increasing security and agility and speeding provisioning from two to three weeks to seven minutes. BP used Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build the Application Engineering Services’ Digital Conveyor. This platform provides process automation that empowers product delivery teams with self-service capabilities, a DevOps approach, and a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.

“The combination of microservices, containers, and a fully automated CI/CD platform provides what developers have been asking for years,” said Paul Costall, head of application engineering services at BP. “They now have full self-service to deliver change from the initial idea, through the innovation, right through to production, as quickly as humanly possible.”

To keep pace with orders, automobile parts manufacturer Asahi Tekko Co., Ltd., needed to speed just in time workflows without expanding its physical footprint. The company needed to replace manual data collection with automated machine monitoring to track and manage quality and productivity.

Achieving these improvements would require increasing machine capacity, but the manufacturer simply did not have the space to accommodate additional machines needed to fulfil larger order volumes. “Although we had a business potential to accept orders up to about three years ahead, the factory’s space was about 3,000 meters too short to accommodate manufacturing all of them,” said Tetsuya Kimura, president and representative director of Asahi Tekko.

To better understand its physical resource use, the company collected operational data from its factory machines, such as production quantity and downtime. However, machine production counters were reviewed and recorded manually, a time-consuming process that lead to incorrect or incomplete entries.

Asahi Tekko employed enterprise open source solutions from Red Hat to create an Internet of Things (IoT) mechanism and business rules engine for automated data collection and real-time insight into machine operations. As a result, Asahi Tekko has cut capital expenditure by around ¥300 million, reduced employee over-work, and even created a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering for other manufacturing companies.

The company created a cycle time monitor, an IoT mechanism that would automatically collect and display operational data to eliminate manual errors and improve productivity. Employees can use this data to focus on repairing or improving slow and broken machines instead of checking each machine’s data. The company deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as the foundation for this solution.

In addition, the company deployed Red Hat Decision Manager (formerly Red Hat JBoss BRMS) as its rules engine, which includes complex event processing (CEP) capabilities that detect the relationship between massive volumes of information in real time. With these capabilities, Asahi Tekko’s IoT solution automatically detects and visualizes necessary site data—such as line production number and stop time—in real time.

BBVA, a financial group that provides financial services to more than 73 million customers in more than 30 countries, needed to update its technology to better support its digital transformation goals and improve its customer experience. “Customers demand 24-hour-a-day functionality from anywhere,” said José María Ruesta, global head of infrastructure, service, and open systems at BBVA.

“We have to achieve a balance between innovation and reliability. But as a bank, trying to translate these values into technology is difficult. Imagine a datacenter full of different operating systems, languages, and interfaces. There’s no room for innovation.”

BBVA wanted to create a single, global, cloud-native platform that is fully automated and self-service, combining real-time and batch data to help developers work efficiently and to ensure high service availability and reliability. As new functions increased the transaction volume handled by BBVA’s backend systems and applications, the group sought to update its IT environment as part of its digital transformation journey.

The company turned to enterprise open source software—including Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform—to build a unified global cloud platform that is fully automated, self-service, and data-centric. With this new platform, the company has increased efficiency and integration to provide a better customer experience and support innovation.

With a global open source platform, BBVA’s developers can quickly and easily deploy code across its branch network, speeding time to market for updates and new services. “Our proprietary platforms created isolation that prevented agile development of new products in line with customer demand,” said Ruesta.

“BBVA is a company with more than 150 years of experience, but the future is never certain. Digital transformation is critical to survival and competitive advantage,” said Ruesta. “Innovation means reinventing ourselves. It’s finding new ways to develop products and services that break the mold of traditional banking.”

The power to accomplish game-changing digital transformation is now available to the business user, who ultimately decides and directs what solutions the business needs. Ultimately, the purpose and intent of such transformation is to deliver value to the customer—quickly, with continuous delivery of quality and functionality. By empowering business users to engage in digital business process management and business rules management systems, enterprises can rapidly deploy and configure business technology to ever-changing processes, when and where it is needed.

Source: Red Hat

Business Process Management Cases – Learning from Real-World Experience

November 2017

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Business Process Management Cases

Digital Innovation and Business Transformation in Practice

© 2018
Jan vom Brocke 0 ,
Jan Mendling 1

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Institute for Information Business, Vienna University of Economics & Business, Vienna, Austria

The first book to present an extensive collection of real-world cases on Business Process Management
Includes cases from world's leading organizations in various sectors
Presents cases from a wide range of regions around the world

Part of the book series: Management for Professionals (MANAGPROF)

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About this book

Toolbox of Methods for the Digital Business Transformation

Building the Processes Behind the Product: How Digital Ventures Create Business Processes That Support Their Growth

Business View: Towards a Digital Enabled Organization

Case Studies
Business Process Management
Teaching Cases
Professional Cases
Real-World BPM Cases

Table of contents (32 chapters)

Front matter, frameworks for business process management: a taxonomy for business process management cases.

Jan vom Brocke, Jan Mendling

Strategy and Governance

How to move from paper to impact in business process management: the journey of sap.

Corinne Reisert, Sarah Zelt, Joerg Wacker

Developing and Implementing a Process-Performance Management System: Experiences from S-Y Systems Technologies Europe GmbH—A Global Automotive Supplier

Josef Blasini, Susanne Leist, Werner Merkl

Establishment of a Central Process Governance Organization Combined with Operational Process Improvements

Christian Czarnecki

BPM Adoption and Business Transformation at Snaga, a Public Company: Critical Success Factors for Five Stages of BPM

Andrej Kovačič, Gregor Hauc, Brina Buh, Mojca Indihar Štemberger

Enabling Flexibility of Business Processes Using Compliance Rules: The Case of Mobiliar

Thanh Tran Thi Kim, Erhard Weiss, Christoph Ruhsam, Christoph Czepa, Huy Tran, Uwe Zdun

Comprehensive Business Process Management at Siemens: Implementing Business Process Excellence

Bartosz Woliński, Saimir Bala

People-Centric, ICT-Enabled Process Innovations via Community, Public and Private Sector Partnership, and e-Leadership: The Case of the Dompe eHospital in Sri Lanka

Wasana Bandara, Rehan Syed, Bandula Ranathunga, K. B. Sampath Kulathilaka

Fast Fish Eat Slow Fish: Business Transformation at Autogrill

Stijn Viaene, Joachim Van den Bergh

The NESTT: Rapid Process Redesign at Queensland University of Technology

Michael Rosemann

Kiss the Documents! How the City of Ghent Digitizes Its Service Processes

Amy Van Looy, Sabine Rotthier

Application of the Design Thinking Approach to Process Redesign at an Insurance Company in Brazil

José Ricardo Cereja, Flavia Maria Santoro, Elena Gorbacheva, Martin Matzner

Collaborative BPM for Business Transformations in Telecommunications: The Case of “3”

Thomas Karle, Kurt Teichenthaler

Process Management in Construction: Expansion of the Bolzano Hospital

Elisa Marengo, Patrick Dallasega, Marco Montali, Werner Nutt, Michael Reifer

Exposing Impediments to Insurance Claims Processing

Robert Andrews, Moe Wynn, Arthur H. M ter Hofstede, Jingxin Xu, Kylie Horton, Paul Taylor et al.

Mining the Usability of Process-Oriented Business Software: The Case of the ARIS Designer of Software AG

Tom Thaler, Sabine Norek, Vittorio De Angelis, Dirk Maurer, Peter Fettke, Peter Loos

Improving Patient Flows at St. Andrew’s War Memorial Hospital’s Emergency Department Through Process Mining

Robert Andrews, Suriadi Suriadi, Moe Wynn, Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede, Sean Rothwell

“The book is a useful and comprehensive summary of several real-life case studies for organizations and researchers. It is a valuable resource in the form of empirical evidence.” (Bálint Molnár, Computing Reviews, July, 2018)

Editors and Affiliations

Jan vom Brocke

Institute for Information Business, Vienna University of Economics & Business, Vienna, Austria

Jan Mendling

About the editors

Bibliographic information.

Book Title : Business Process Management Cases

Book Subtitle : Digital Innovation and Business Transformation in Practice

Editors : Jan vom Brocke, Jan Mendling

Series Title : Management for Professionals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58307-5

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Business and Management , Business and Management (R0)

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-319-58306-8 Published: 29 August 2017

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-319-86372-6 Published: 14 August 2018

eBook ISBN : 978-3-319-58307-5 Published: 10 August 2017

Series ISSN : 2192-8096

Series E-ISSN : 2192-810X

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XVI, 610

Number of Illustrations : 290 b/w illustrations, 2 illustrations in colour

Topics : Business Process Management , Information Systems Applications (incl. Internet) , Business Information Systems , Organization , Organizational Studies, Economic Sociology

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Business Process Management (BPM) is a systematic approach to managing and streamlining business processes . BPM is intended to help improve the efficiency of existing processes, with the goal of increasing productivity and overall business performance.

BPM is often confused with other seemingly similar initiatives. For example, BPM is smaller in scale than business process reengineering (BPR), which radically overhauls or replaces processes. Conversely, it has a larger scope than task management, which deals with individual tasks, and project management, which handles one-time initiatives. And while enterprise resource planning (ERP) integrates and manages all aspects of a business, BPM focuses on its individual functions—optimizing the organization’s existing, repeatable processes end-to-end.

An effective BPM project employs structured processes, uses appropriate technologies and fosters collaboration among team members. It enables organizations to streamline project workflows, enhance productivity and consistently deliver value to stakeholders. Ultimately, the successful implementation of BPM tools can lead to increased customer satisfaction, competitive advantage and improved business outcomes.

3 main types of business process management

Integration-centric BPM focuses on processes that don’t require much human involvement. These include connecting different systems and software to streamline processes and improve data flow across the organization, for example human resource management (HRM) or customer relationship management (CRM)

Human-centric BPM centers around human involvement, often where an approval process is required. Human-centric BPM prioritizes the designing of intuitive processes with drag and drop features that are easy for people to use and understand, aiming to enhance productivity and collaboration among employees.

Document-centric BPM is for efficiently managing documents and content—such as contracts—within processes. A purchasing agreement between a client and vendor, for example, needs to evolve and go through different rounds of approval and be organized, accessible and compliant with regulations.

Business process management examples

BPM can help improve overall business operations by optimizing various business processes. Here are some BPM examples that outline the use cases and benefits of BPM methodology:

Business strategy

BPM serves as a strategic tool for aligning business processes with organizational goals and objectives. By connecting workflow management, centralizing data management , and fostering collaboration and communication, BPM enables organizations to remain competitive by providing access to accurate and timely data. This ensures that strategic decisions are based on reliable insights.

Through BPM, disparate data sources—including spend data, internal performance metrics and external market research—can be connected. This can uncover internal process improvements, strategic partnership opportunities and potential cost-saving initiatives. BPM also provides the foundation for making refinements and enhancements that lead to continuous improvement.

Enhanced decision-making
Efficient optimization
Continuous improvement

Claims management

BPM can be used to standardize and optimize the claims process from start to finish. BPM software can automate repetitive tasks such as claim intake, validation, assessment, and payment processing—using technology such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA ). By establishing standardized workflows and decision rules, BPM streamlines the claims process by reducing processing times and minimizing errors. BPM can also provide real-time visibility into claim status and performance metrics. This enables proactive decision-making, ensures consistency and improves operational efficiency.

Automated claim processing
Reduced processing times
Enhanced visibility

Compliance and risk management

By automating routine tasks and implementing predefined rules, BPM enables timely compliance with regulatory requirements and internal policies. Processes such as compliance checks, risk evaluations and audit trails can be automated by using business process management software, and organizations can establish standardized workflows for identifying, assessing, and mitigating compliance risks. Also, BPM provides real-time insights into compliance metrics and risk exposure, enabling proactive risk management and regulatory reporting.

Automated compliance checks
Real-time insights into risk exposure
Enhanced regulatory compliance

Contract management

Contract turnaround times can be accelerated, and administrative work can be reduced by automating tasks such as document routing, approval workflows and compliance checks. Processes such as contract drafting, negotiation, approval, and execution can also be digitized and automated. Standardized workflows can be created that guide contracts through each stage of the lifecycle. This ensures consistency and reduces inefficiency. Real-time visibility into contract status improves overall contract management.

Accelerated contract turnaround times
Real-time visibility into contract status
Strengthened business relationships

Customer service

BPM transforms customer service operations by automating service request handling, tracking customer interactions, and facilitating resolution workflows. Through BPM, organizations can streamline customer support processes across multiple channels, including phone, email, chat, and social media. With BPM, routine tasks such as ticket routing and escalation are automated. Notifications can be generated to update customers about the status of their requests. This reduces response times and improves customer experience by making service more consistent. BPM also provides agents with access to a centralized knowledge base and customer history, enabling them to resolve inquiries more efficiently and effectively.

Streamlined service request handling
Centralized knowledge base access
Enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty

Financial management

BPM is used to streamline financial processes such as budgeting, forecasting, expense management, and financial reporting. It ensures consistency and accuracy in financial processes by establishing standardized workflows and decision rules, reducing the risk of human errors and improving regulatory compliance. BPM uses workflow automation to automate repetitive tasks such as data entry, reconciliation and report generation. Real-time visibility into financial data enables organizations to respond quickly to changing market conditions.

Increased operational efficiency
Instant insights for informed decision-making
Enhanced compliance with regulations and policies

Human resources

Using BPM, organizations can implement standardized HR workflows that guide employees through each stage of their employment experience, from recruitment to retirement . The new employee onboarding process and performance evaluations can be digitized, which reduces administrative work and allows team members to focus on strategic initiatives such as talent development and workforce planning. Real-time tracking of HR metrics provides insights into employee engagement, retention rates, and the use and effectiveness of training.

Reduced administrative work
Real-time tracking of HR metrics
Enhanced employee experience

Logistics management

BPM optimizes logistics management by automating processes such as inventory management, order fulfillment, and shipment tracking, including those within the supply chain. Workflows can be established that govern the movement of goods from supplier to customer. Automating specific tasks such as order processing, picking, packing and shipping reduces cycle times and improves order accuracy. BPM can also provide real-time data for inventory levels and shipment status, which enables proactive decision-making and exception management.

Streamlined order processing and fulfillment
Real-time visibility into inventory and shipments
Enhanced customer satisfaction and cost savings

Order management

BPM streamlines processes such as order processing, tracking, and fulfillment. BPM facilitates business process automation —the automation of routine tasks such as order entry, inventory management, and shipping, reducing processing times and improving order accuracy. By establishing standardized workflows and rules, BPM ensures consistency and efficiency throughout the order lifecycle. Increased visibility of order status and inventory levels enables proactive decision-making and exception management.

Automated order processing
Real-time visibility into order status
Improved customer satisfaction

Procurement management

BPM revolutionizes procurement management through the digital transformation and automation of processes such as vendor selection, purchase requisition, contract management, and pricing negotiations. Workflows can be established that govern each stage of the procurement lifecycle, from sourcing to payment. By automating tasks such as supplier qualification, RFx management, and purchase order processing, BPM reduces cycle times and improves efficiency. Also, with real-time metrics such as spend analysis, supplier performance, and contract compliance, BPM enables business process improvement by providing insights into areas suitable for optimization.

Standardized procurement workflows
Real-time insights into procurement metrics
Cost savings and improved supplier relationships

Product lifecycle management

BPM revolutionizes product lifecycle management by digitizing and automating processes such as product design, development, launch, and maintenance. Workflows that govern each stage of the product lifecycle, from ideation to retirement can be standardized. Requirements gathering, design reviews, and change management , can be automated. This accelerates time-to-market and reduces development costs. BPM can also encourage cross-functional collaboration among product development teams, which ensures alignment and transparency throughout the process.

Accelerated time-to-market
Reduced development costs
Enhanced cross-functional collaboration

Project management

In the beginning of this page, we noted that BPM is larger in scale than project management. In fact, BPM can be used to improve the project management process. Business process management tools can assign tasks, track progress, identify bottlenecks and allocate resources. Business process modeling helps in visualizing and designing new workflows to guide projects through each stage of the BPM lifecycle. This ensures consistency and alignment with project objectives. Tasks assignments, scheduling, and progress monitoring can be automated, which reduces administrative burden and improves efficiency. Also, resource utilization and project performance can be monitored in real time to make sure resources are being used efficiently and effectively.

Streamlined project workflows
Real-time insights into project performance
Enhanced stakeholder satisfaction

Quality assurance management

BPM facilitates the automation of processes such as quality control, testing, and defect tracking, while also providing insights into KPIs such as defect rates and customer satisfaction scores. Quality assurance (QA) process steps are guided by using standardized workflows to ensure consistency and compliance with quality standards. Metrics and process performance can be tracked in real time to enable proactive quality management. Process-mapping tools can also help identify inefficiencies, thereby fostering continuous improvement and QA process optimization.

Automated quality control processes
Real-time visibility into quality metrics

Business process management examples: Case studies

Improving procure-to-pay in state government.

In 2020, one of America’s largest state governments found itself in search of a new process analysis solution . The state had integrated a second management system into its procurement process, which required the two systems, SAP SRM and SAP ECC, to exchange data in real time. With no way to analyze the collected data, the state couldn’t monitor the impact of its newly integrated SAP SRM system, nor detect deviations during the procurement process. This created an expensive problem.

The state used IBM Process Mining to map out its current workflow and track the progress of the SAP SRM system integration. Using the software’s discovery tool, data from both management systems was optimized to create a single, comprehensive process model. With the end-to-end process mapped out, the state was able to monitor all its process activities and review the performance of specific agencies.

Streamlining HR at Anheuser-Busch

AB InBev wanted to streamline its complicated HR landscape by implementing a singular global solution to support employees and improve their experience, and it selected workday as its human capital management (HCM) software. Working with a team from IBM® Workday consulting services , part of IBM Consulting™, AB InBev worked with IBM to remediate the integration between the legacy HR apps and the HCM software.

What was once a multi-system tool with unorganized data has become a single source of truth, enabling AB InBev to run analytics for initiatives like examining employee turnover at a local scale. Workday provides AB InBev with a streamlined path for managing and analyzing data, ultimately helping the company improve HR processes and reach business goals.

Business process management and IBM

Effective business process management (BPM) is crucial for organizations to achieve more streamlined operations and enhance efficiency. By optimizing processes, businesses can drive growth, stay competitive and realize sustainable success.

IBM Consulting offers a range of solutions to make your process transformation journey predictable and rewarding.

Traditional AI and generative AI-enabled Process Excellence practice uses the leading process mining tools across the IBM ecosystem and partners.
Our patented IBM PEX Value Triangle includes industry standards, benchmarks, and KPIs and is used to quickly identify process performance issues and assess where and how our clients can optimize and automate everywhere possible.
IBM Automation Quotient Framework and Digital Center of Excellence (COE) platform prioritized and speeds up automation opportunities, ultimately establishing a Process Excellence COE for continuous value orchestration and governance across your organization.

Key improvements might include 60-70% faster procurement, faster loan booking, and reduced finance rework rate, along with risk avoidance, and increased customer and employee satisfaction.

With principles grounded in open innovation, collaboration and trust, IBM Consulting doesn’t just advise clients. We work side by side to design, build, and operate high-performing businesses—together with our clients and partners.

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