After Strategy, Tactics

Remember: Phillips believes that thinking big is a key to successful BPM. Maritz starts with a macro process, such as selling, then tackles subphases, such as quick turnarounds on projects, contract building and dealing with outside suppliers. Phillips and his team do major releases every quarter, minor releases every month.

A major release might address an entire subphase, "say, how we link in the participant management function", Phillips says. Martitz's participant management staffers book the air and hotel travel, handle questions from the people attending the trip and so on. "A minor release might deal with a portion of our contract process or pricing process," he says.

The net for the company? "We certainly get faster, but more importantly, we get better," he says. "We get repeatability. It's the integrity of our delivery process."

"We're also identifying softer benefits," Phillips says. "It used to be harder to bring in employees to use our new systems. Now it's much more intuitive, and people have crisper access to the right information at the right time to do their jobs.

The process revamp has helped Maritz staffers not only find the right information faster, but also, spend more time on activities that add value for clients, Phillips says. For example, Maritz historically has used numerous forms throughout its travel program planning operation. "Our people needed to find the right forms, retype information into these forms, distribute these forms [via e-mail], then ensure that form updates made their way to all of the right people [internally, external partners, clients]," he says. Now the company prepopulates those forms. "We also serve up those forms to people at the right time to ensure process integrity and timely information distribution," he adds. "In addition to delivering better service, our people are freed up to focus on incremental value delivery," such as, he says, creative thinking, information analysis and supplier negotiations.

"BPM also drives down end-user workarounds," he says, noting that part of his initial pitch to other business leaders on the need for the BPM effort was that the company had a lot of useful data hiding in spreadsheets and e-mail because people were working around existing enterprise processes. "It was a real issue for us."

A final deployment strategy that Phillips recommends is to establish what he calls "distributed ownership teams" for a BPM revamp. That means having businesspeople reporting up from the trenches, helping shape what needs to happen in those major and minor releases and then helping communicate the benefits of the proposed changes for customers back to the work groups.

This arrangement can be thought of as a change management best practice, eliminating some of the "us vs them" tension endemic to any transformation, large or small. "We all know people in the trenches know the most about what's working, where the opportunities are," he says. "They've already established credibility with their peers, as opposed to having people pointing to a central group and saying: 'Hey, they don't understand us; they don't understand our problems'."

How is the process revamp paying off? According to Phillips, since the BPM effort began, Maritz has improved its customer quality indicators while reducing overhead. "Some of our cost ratios have improved between 8 and 24 percent," he says. "That's important since our industry is becoming increasingly cost-competitive."

Overall, he notes, Maritz's process is now "keyed more to where parts are in the pipeline than to people". This helps him spot trouble more quickly. "I can see cycle time issues and reduce time to clients," says Phillips.