For the past few months I’ve been engaging in an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system merger & new supply chain management project. I was mainly involved with change management, more specifically business process change. Not only was I responsible for designing the new supply chain processes, but also identifying and driving the adoption of process change across the organisation.
Being a strong advocate for customer experience management and human centred design, I was hoping to influence the organisation with a more human centred approach. I tried to be the “voice of the business” when management was more prone to taking an IT or systems approach to designing their new business processes.
There are various influences or factors involved in why management is being “IT” led versus being “experience” or “process” led. Be that as it may, the best approach is an integrated, holistic one. It’s important to understand the three fundamental organisational layers when designing organisational changes. These three layers need to be in harmony if you want to create exponential business value. The three layers are as follows:
1. Start by understanding your current customer journey. Make sure you map your end-to-end customer journey and base your journey analysis on actual customer insights. Too often we find ourselves mapping the customer journey based on business assumptions and not actual customer insights. When you have a view of your current state journey you can dive into designing your future state customer journey.
2. The next step is to identify the critical business processes in your customer journey and set up alerts to monitor the impact of the business processes performance on the customer experience. This way you will be able to identify and fix any underlying process inefficiencies. Effective Business Process Management (BPM) is critical to ultimately improving your overall customer experience. Some CX professionals refer to this as “Voice of the Process”. The clue is to align your operational process measures with your key customer moments of truth (MOT’s).
3. Only when you have aligned your customer journeys and business processes can you delve into the third layer – technology. Here it is important to analyse and understand how your existing systems – hardware and software enable business processes to deliver the customer journey. Start with the ‘as-is’ or current view and move unto the ‘to-be’ or future state.
Business Process Management (BPM) provides critical insights into customer processes, allowing the business to turn potentially difficult events into positive moments, while technology enables the experiences.
