Your First Step to Success
Ultra’s Business Process Improvement and independent enterprise software selection services are the first step in implementing the best fit software to guide you along your ultimate business process transformation. The achievements of our clients prove that Ultra’s BPI services are in place to promote your business success and reduce your time to benefit, which will ultimately lead to a solid return on your investment. All of Ultra’s service activities are designed to drive significant and sustainable business process improvement benefits.
From Process Improvements to Business Performance
For today’s top manufacturing and distribution companies, improving productivity is about improving business processes. Ultra’s Business Process Improvement (BPI) services focus on understanding your processes and business requirements, and identifying areas of improvement based on best practices with a track record of reducing process waste.
Our services provide you with a roadmap to:
- Improved productivity
- Optimal decision-making
- Effective utilization of assets and resources
- Attainment of effective business processes
BPI is the key to doing more with less and working smarter in all areas throughout the supply chain process, from the loading dock to the front office.
Step-by-Step Business Process Transformation
Transforming your business processes requires creating a vision of the future state from your current state – and on to defining the business value for the project. Done properly, this foundation will establish alignment of expectations with management, improve the efficiency of your team, eliminate process waste, and reduce the time to benefit for your project.
In a business process improvement project, there are five areas of focus:
Project Organization
A successful business process transformation project requires an organization of business process owners. With this team of business process owners, we determine the project scope, objectives, and measurements for the engagement.
Our team will ensure all participants in your project are in alignment and have a common understanding of these focus areas. Next, we will guide you through four project initiation steps:
- Building your steering team
- Allocating your project team
- Aligning process owners
- Defining your project charter
Finally, an executive session is conducted as a sort of business process review to define your strategy, determine the maturity of your sales and operations planning, and complete management scorecards. The scorecard involves identifying current key business metrics and determining future benchmarks to help monitor and manage your company’s progress.
Current State Analysis
Analyzing your current state requires gathering key performance metrics and their value. Examples include productivity, quality, overtime, inventory, and others.
Another integral part of any current state analysis is business process mapping. Depending on your industry, these can include processes like Quote to Order, Order to Cash, and Procure to Pay. Ultra will help you create these maps at a functional level.
By visually engaging in this business process documentation, it becomes very easy for the team to identify waste and redundant data and processes. These current state problems are documented as opportunities to be addressed in the future state.
As part of this business process analysis, we will ensure your team understands and has documented:
- Business operations
- Business processes
- Software systems
- Master data and information flow
- IT strategy & infrastructure
We will then prioritize these improvement opportunities based on cost, timing, change difficulty, and benefits.
Visioning and Education
Before we can begin to define the future state, we need the process owners to understand “what is possible” with a new enterprise software solution. Our clients rely on Ultra’s proven expertise and research for insight into the latest enterprise software systems and ever-changing industry best practices.
Our collaborative business process education curriculum and visioning workshops combine best practices for your industry with enabling technology solutions to construct your future state.
Because we have extensive experience working with clients just like you, we can educate your team on applicable terminology and best practice process flows. Additionally, we will enhance your ERP education experience with live demos and recorded webinars to help you understand everything you can accomplish throughout the project.
By achieving alignment with your future state vision, your team is best positioned to move into a more detailed future state opportunity stage that will define enabling system requirements. By educating your team, we uncover and resolve many organizational change management issues.
Future State Opportunity
The Ultra team will facilitate several workshops with your project team to develop your future state. This development of future state process is also known as business process reengineering.
These workshops will be organized by business process flow, and will help you identify the gaps between the current state and industry best practices to effectively design your future state business processes.
These workshops serve to identify areas where you can eliminate waste and improve your business productivity. As the design of the future state becomes clear, Ultra will lead your team to define and quantify the benefits that can be realized from the future state. This critical activity feeds into the development of key statements that articulate the business purpose and value of change.
Business Case for Change
The business case for change is your main project driver and the foundational justification for your project. It is a compilation of business value statements that are the goals we strive to achieve in the Benefits Realization phase.
The future state vision you developed during the Visioning and Education steps is taken and translated into a credible business case. Ultra will work with each of your process owners to develop a business case for his/her domain of responsibility with assignments they can confidently achieve.
The business case for change is important because it is used at every major milestone to confirm decisions and actions are aligned with attaining project expectations.
Project Charter and Transformation Roadmap
With the information that has been created in this BPI phase, the team can create the first draft of the project charter. As part of this discussion, Ultra will lead the team through the development of a project roadmap which defines the deployment strategy for the transformation.
